


And, trying to unfold for you, was brittle

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationships, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-26 03:44:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes your life gets flipped like a table when a meteor smashes into a mountain, murderous bugs move into your backyard, and a rainbow drinker breaks into your house. It’s (probably) not your fault that any of this happens, but it (probably) is your fault for reacting to it by rigging your cat's mausoleum with hidden cameras. Or: Rose Lalonde the Vampire Slayer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Life: Happen

Rose is sixteen when a meteor smashes into a mountain just fifty miles from her house on a dusty April morning. It is unusually large and intact and light; the path of its destruction is limited to one farmhouse, six cows, and a new sharp-sloped hill to be used for maybe skiing or a tourist attraction. For weeks afterwards people begin conversations with, “Did you see that meteor?” and sometimes cross themselves. Rose is not a girl who rolls her eyes when she’s talking to people face-to-face, but it is mighty difficult to restrain herself. They talk as though it is the end of the world. As far as Rose is concerned, it is not a proper apocalypse unless there is nuclear warfare, a doomed wizard, and maybe some zombies.

But like many things in life, the real news of the week, the one that no one knows about or pays attention to for some days, comes when an organic farm in Ithaca imports a shipment of red Alternian plumpfruits infested with striped tree bleeders. By the end of the week, an enormous, black cloud flies from the Catskill mountains to the Adirondacks. They cover the trees, drain them, then fall to the ground, their enormous pincers and teeth gnashing with feline satisfaction. Their fat, bulbous twelve-winged bodies are as long as her forearms, their horns long and sharp as boar tusks. The local news station send a reporter out to the field to spray one bleeder with a can of Raid, and their next major story is, "LOCAL MAIMED BY ALTERNIAN BUGS.”

By the beginning of May, the mountains turn a dusty, dull brown. Leaves rattle around Rose’s feet when she walks to and from the front door to her mother’s car in the mornings and afternoons. Her mother, a specialist in Alternian physiology and wildlife, joins a committee, and for the rest of the month, Rose lives off of overly elaborate finger sandwiches: egg salad, tuna salad, cucumber salad, sushi salad, all impeccably made and finished off with tiny toothpicks going straight through the center. Rose leaves a note on the fridge, next to the laminated map of Alternaterra she colored in the first grade, six human continents on one side of the globe, and one supermassive troll continent on the other: “Mother, I will take the liberty of ordering out for the next week. Please don’t trouble yourself to make me dinner.” She calls for Chinese that night, and instead of lo mein and spicy beef tripe, the delivery boy gives her another collection of sandwiches. “Darling Rose,” the note inside says. “God forbid that you ever go hungry. I made these with tomatoes. I know how much you love them.”

 

*

 

In June, a troop of sliceterminators stop in Potsdam on their way to Albany. The troll general is a close friend of her mother’s, and is coming from Potsdam to their tiny, godforsaken village just to see her. Rose has never met him before, and she’s okay with that.

“I have homework,” Rose says.

“Forget your homework, darling,” her mother says. “It’s always important to cultivate your troll friends. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

Rose has a mental image of her mother pinning down her troll friend to the bed, and her entire brain spins around and snaps away from her brainstem.

“I’ve been thinking, Rose dearest,” her mother says. “You’ve always needed more companions. What about a nice trollish gentleman? A trollish gentlelady? Your hobbies have always trended towards the esoteric and strange. I don’t see why your romantic options shouldn’t. Why, the captain tells me that he has a collection of young grubs yearning for some shore leave. Brush up on your accent, dear. You need to impress.”

“My accent’s impeccable,” Rose says. Rose signed up for a penpal program in the fourth grade to mine her troll informant for tales of the horrific and the grimdark. Four letters later, she was banned from participating in any other cultural exchange programs and brought to the school psychologist. Rose’s mother had a tutor come in to teach her human and troll etiquette and sensitivity: how to order at restaurants, the famous ballad of Shanas Orobos, why you should never slap a troll unless you want to be hate married. When Rose learned enough, she had the tutor slide his resignation under her mother’s bedroom door and used the new two hours of free time to diagnose celebrities on TV using a stolen library copy of the DSM-IV. “And I intend to become a nun of the church of horrorterrors.”

Her mother clicks and clucks and pours herself yet another martini. “I can’t imagine why you’d deny yourself the pleasure.”

“Oh my god, mother.”

“They really can be so sweet once you find their weak spots,” she says. “It’s the same with all people.” Her mother picks up three hangers. Dresses in putrid pink and lavender and purple dance from her fingers. “Pick one, dear. I recommend picking a color that makes our troll friends associate you with a higher caste.”

“I’ve always found scarlet to be exceedingly fetching.”

“Don’t be silly, love.”

“The loveliest of oranges,” Rose says. “The finest greens.” The dresses dangle. The metal hangers clink and click against one another. Her mother takes sips. Rose goes with the lavender.

“Good choice, darling,” her mother says. “It goes with your eyes.”

 

*

 

The trolls arrive at her house in the evening. Rose stands behind her mother and watches, with dreary curiosity, as the sliceterminators line up in rows on her driveway. They’re six, seven feet tall, some knife-thin, some wide and thick as walls. There are thirty, forty of them, maybe more. A troll in blue in the front stops, yells at the others. Then he turns.

He’s at least seven feet tall, carrying a heavy metal box over his shoulder with blades sticking out of its long slits, and wearing a mask connected to a little air supply on his chest. He looks like he might break her fingers if she shakes his hand. Naturally, her mother is an imposing Greek statue of a woman, and is not at all intimidated. No one, Rose thinks with sour pride, could ever lay a hand on her mother. Her mother and the troll refer to one another in familiar pronouns. They talk about research: the production of human purrbeasts, the importation of trollish cats, the long legs of Troll Audrey Hepburn. The blue blood even smiles at her mother, face splitting to reveal at least two rows of needle teeth. He looks at his troops, at the people from the local newspaper, and then at Rose.

“She’s a pitiful-looking girl,” he says. “Absolutely delectable.”

“Thank you,” Rose says back.

“She speaks the Standard,” he says to her mother.

“Evidently,” Rose says.

The troll meets her eyes. Then he turns back to her mother. Her mother smiles down at Rose, a little coolly, and she is either putting on a facsimile of pride, or thinks Rose needs to work on her accent.

“Don’t mind her, dear,” her mother says to the blueblood. “Why don’t you have your units show us humans how to take care of those bugs before you go to Albany?”

The sliceterminators demonstrate their technique: first dousing the area in a bright red fog of chemicals, then walking into the cloud and shooting blades from their strange contraption. Most of them return from the cloud carrying a bleeder by the rear pincers. Rose watches their cool military efficiency, so different from the popular image of bloodthirsty, raving monsters in films and on television. All armies are like that, though, she thinks. But it’s hard to not be charmed by the cold façade of ruthless heartlessness. Rose chalks it up to being raised by the chief minion of icy irony herself. She appreciates a glimpse of this other world, everything as it is and nothing out of place.

 

*

 

When she turns seventeen in December, her mother buys her a beautiful, thundering beast of a car, likely capable of breaking the sound barrier. After some thought, her mother buys a second car for Rose meant for cruising.

“Fuck you, Lalonde,” Dave says when she tells him about her mother’s gifts. Dave is her Texan half-brother, though as far as they can tell, they share neither a mother nor a father. All they know is that their family tree twists, knots, and turns into a Moebius strip. “My brother films puppet porn in my rod. They did it on the roof, the hood, the gear shift. Twice on the hand brake. Butts getting touched more than once. Shit, my libido just went into reverse.”

He is both her dearest friend and fondest conversation partner, but he doesn’t have much competition. Rose _has_ no other friends—she once made out with a few of her mother’s college students, but then it got creepy, so she chalks that whole thing up to ‘misguided experimentation’ and ‘A Lesson Learned’ and pretends it never happened—no one except her brother and her mother’s favorite cats and purrbeasts, who have recently started interbreeding. All sorts of strange kittens crawl around the forests and woods, kittens with four eyes and six legs, and jaws meant to swallow instead of crush. Rose finds them quite charming, but the state of New York makes her mother round up the cats and purrbeasts and put them away somewhere else. They all go except for Mutie, who her mother calls Zippanforisto, after some wizard or another.

When she first got her car, her mother had the faintest and most fleeting of hopes that Rose would use the car to connect with her classmates. And for a few days, she did. Their pointed accusations of ‘what are you doing here, Lalonde,’ veiled beneath a mask of baffled confusion, is entertaining for a little while. But then someone tells her, “Just go away, you bitch,” and Rose no longer sees the point in toying with them. It’s not satisfying destroying someone with words when your words have no effect on them. And they weren’t that interesting, anyway. She’d rather spend time with Mutie. Now she uses the car to run errands, drive herself to school and violin lessons, and occasionally indulge in long, unscenic drives around the mountains.

By now, the trees surrounding her house and the whole stretch of mountain from Canada to Pennsylvania are withered and deathly, but the infestation has, evidently, been taken care of. Rose’s chances of being stabbed in the face by a massive bug are approximately zero, her mother tells her, in an attempt to plant the seed of irrational fear into Rose’s mind to keep Rose from driving the depressing, mountainous New York highways around their house in the early winter.

“Dear mother,” she says—her mother smiles into her martini glass, and Rose knows she has laid it on too thickly—“I am the most careful of drivers. I will put chains on my tires and only drive on the major roads.”

“I should buy you a car with a four wheel drive.”

“I will salt the highway before I drive them. I will hire a squad of troll mercenaries wielding flamethrowers. They will rape and pillage the countryside like restless knights of medieval lore, all in the name of land acquisition and taking an enormous shit in the mouth of an opposing lord.”

“There is no reason to go to such extreme lengths, Rose darling. Let mother take care of it.”

“I don’t want you to take care of it.”

“Darling, your livelihood is much more important than your pride,” her mother says, and the words are reinterpreted in Rose’s mind as, “ _submit_.”

The roads are clean and salted a week later. Her mother is a human Medici, grooming her for tenure at Harvard and rehabilitating Troll Jung’s reputation as a serious academic. Maybe write some fanfiction of Troll Jung visiting Troll Freud’s couch and having a contest in who can be the best pale and ashen prostitute. Oh, to grasp those spiraling horns.

 

*

 

Her mother is out tonight on a conference in Arizona. Rose has watched her mother give this presentation ten or twelve times, each time judging, “Too rambly” or “you’re slurring” or “That dress enhances curves I never knew you had, mother.”

Rose eats dinner, then drives herself to her violin lessons. It’s nearly sunset. The trees, black and brown and dead, cast dark bars across the road. She blares Mozart’s _Eine kleine Nachtmusik_ out of her stereo system, and drives to the sound of furious violins.

Her house is several miles away from the main town. When it snows, she has to shift to first gear to make her way down the slope from her house to the highway, and even then, she has one foot tapping the brake. Once she’s on the highway, driving alone on the barely-lit road, she becomes uneasy. The mountains unnerve her. Not the size or the height or the constant threat of being eaten alive by Alternian bloodsuckers. No, what’s frightening is how everything seems half as wide and twice as tall as it’s supposed to, and sometimes she thinks she’s the only person who’s noticed: there is something wrong in the world, and no one else knows.

Her whole life has been like this, looking out the window and seeing everything a little wrong. The trees bend towards her car—tall, looming shadows that remind her of the dreams she had, starting right around her twelfth birthday, that made her think she was dying. Horrible, painful night terrors that no one knew about because she was too proud to scream and because she thought—anyone would think—that she was losing her mind, dreaming about her own death and the death of all things. Black, reaching, boneless arms and furious, plasma fire. She chalks it up to latent xenophobia and too many wizard novels.

She’s debating whether or not it would be productive to continue thinking about her dreams when a motorcycle, with its single bright headlight, stops in the middle of the road. She’s annoyed, at first—then she hits the brake when she realizes it’s not a motorcycle, but a person. Her car skids on a curve, and comes two inches from whacking a mailbox into the ground.

Rose is a classy broad. She doesn’t give the woman the finger and demand to know what kind of person stands on the middle of a highway after sunset. An idiot, her mind supplies helpfully, _that’s_ the kind of person who stands in the middle of highways after sunset. But it helps that the woman is glowing, like a ghost or an apparition. She is a thing of nightmares. Rose—

Rose does not panic, but observes. Her grip on the wheel locks in place, knee and calf and hamstrings all tense, ready to run. The woman walks up to Rose’s car, and puts a glowing hand on the windshield. It is a troll in a bloodied Alternian military uniform, wearing a medical patch on one sleeve. She doesn’t know why the troll is emitting light, but, of course, the real question is why the troll didn’t leave with her company.

She lowers her window. The troll is quite pretty—maybe more than quite. Rose’s mouth slides into a smile, like it’s a natural expression for her. “This is quite the sight,” she says. “A glowing deserter of Her Imperious Condescension’s army, wandering the mountains of New York. I can only suppose that you were so taken by the prospect of skiing and other wintery fun-time adventures that you chose to join us in the boondocks, where we take our daily breakfast with organic cheese and fair-trade coffee. Or nightly. I shouldn’t be prejudiced against the nocturnal half of our planet.” Shit. She is engaging in the Dave Strider school of flirting by opening her mouth and letting bullshit come out. She has become one of those drivers who see hitchhikers and stop to wolf-whistle, blare their horns, and say things like, ‘Hey, dollface, nice gams,’ only disguising it beneath cheese and coffee.

Still, the troll puts her hands on Rose’s shoulders and looks at Rose fondly, as though yes, Rose has not completely blown it. Rose is preparing a detailed commentary on human-troll relations when the troll, almost gently, touches Rose’s cheek and says, “ _Hsssskkkkksssrreeeeeeeee_.” Rose’s words don’t as much stop as they cease to exist entirely.

She bends down, and then into, the car; her horns scrape the seat’s head rest. The angle of the troll’s head briefly inspires an urge to take note of this moment and, perhaps, commit it to poetry—just briefly, because then she bites.

It isn’t painful at first, mostly because the first bite is more of a test, tooth pressing into skin. But then she hears the troll’s jaw click and then a sound of a pencil driving into a rubber eraser—except it’s not a pencil, they’re fangs, fangs piercing through muscle and tendon to reach artery. And yes, fuck, it hurts, she doesn’t understand why she ever thought that bullshit about vampires pumping anesthetic into the wound would ever be true. She’s waiting for unconsciousness to take her out of her misery. The troll licks her neck.

Good lord, Rose thinks, somewhere between panic and shock. This all happened because of her congenital smartassery. And for maximum irony—Dave can go fuck himself—her mental voice is tinged red and especially ironic. ‘Cool, Lalonde, stop to offer a chick a ride, no way that could go wrong.’

‘Congrats, Rose. Getting your _Carmilla_ up for the first time. Toothular penetration to the neck? At least she didn’t strip you to go straight for a boob bite. Look at what a gentletroll she is. Bunp.’

‘Hey, Rose, guess you’ve become a poster child for why you shouldn’t let your vagina decide whether you chat up ladies who stop in the middle of the road but it’s all cool, blame it on the vampiric thrall’ and oh, fuck, ow ow _ow ow_ somewhere out there, Dave Strider is laughing at her. The pain doesn’t go away, but it dulls. Rose spends ten—fifteen—however many minutes it is, feeling blood gush out of her neck, only to be lapped by a thin, long tongue, swallowed down and slurped wetly. Then, with a few final, long licks, the troll withdraws. Rose inhales so fast and deeply that she gets dizzy. The troll licks her lips. She reaches into her uniform, and applies a band-aid to Rose’s neck.

Rose has no fucking clue what just happened. She touches her neck, and stares up at the troll, who is now peering down at Rose with a similarly bewildered expression.

“Oh my,” the troll says.

“I must be drunk,” Rose says. “Otherwise I would have to ask myself why you have apparently decided to make like a vampire and suck.” She could deliver a lecture on the assault and battery laws of the Empire State, but if she’s worried that if she does, she’ll have to resort to crude tactics such as the time-honored tradition of running the fuck away.

“You by coincidence perhaps given to seeming a familiarity to me that is not coincidental but the potentiality is so,” the troll says in English. Her eyes, jade green, look earnest and damnably worried.

“Charming,” Rose says, in Alternian. “I can only assume that you do not mean that as a pick up line.”

The troll, either determined or perhaps, like most trolls, born with an innate inability to comprehend the concept of anyone but a troll speaking Alternian, plows on in English. “Of intentions to use ‘pick up line’ there are none I present to you caveats your vehicular safety strap-in mechanism preventing my ‘pick up’ ability now allowing for multiple variant answer inquiring in the car are you human all right I am trained professorial medicine cutter.” There is a little pause. “ _Hua zhongguowen_?”

“I feel as though I could tell you that I am speaking in your native tongue for the next ten minutes without you understanding,” Rose says. “But setting aside your insistent massacring of the English language, I am afraid that you terrify me in several other respects that will now cause me to speed away, and hope that you have been hit by a car by the time I return.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. She absconds.


	2. Rose: Burn Sandwiches

Rose skips her violin lesson in favor of driving into town. She has been an ideal student for years, coming in during rain, snow, and walking pneumonia. She’s earned this. She will drink coffee and devour a buttery pastry, and later on she will have the sense to return to the road and run over any trolls standing in the middle of it for no damn reason.

But this is small-town New York, bane of Rose’s existence and a small, private hell full of “NO FRACKING” signs, tacky yard decorations, and abundant livestock who sometimes force gym class cancelations by shitting all over the track. It’s after seven when she pulls her car into the parking lot. The banks are closed. The tasteless boutiques with their feathered skirts and sequined tank tops are closed. The one, single cafe in town shuts down at five. The town’s late night haunts consist of a pizza joint and a Chinese place, which is technically run by the brother of the town’s lumberjack. Rose goes to the nearly empty pizza place, with its foul, soggy slices and rats dying in the wall, but she can’t pop her collar high enough to hide the puncture marks on her neck from an entire restaurant of The Locals and her frustrating classmates. She’ll take an empty, rundown hole in the wall over her classmates. She purchases a slice of plain cheese and lets it grow cold as she reads the local paper front-to-back and makes suggestions for improvement in red ink. There is no mention of anyone being attacked by troll soldiers, and as far as Rose can see, all papers refer to the sliceterminators as having departed from New York entirely. No deserters—which wouldn’t have been mentioned to begin with, because that’s the whole point of desertion, to avoid detection and not get shot by Her Imperious Condescension’s psychic death lasers.

Rose suddenly remembers the old troll saying: “Cuttlefish, bruttlefish, smuttlefish, harrumph.” It clarifies nothing. Her pen blots, then punches through the page. Rose gets startled by a car’s headlights, curses, and throws away the slice of pizza on her way out of the joint.

Rose goes to the grocery store. Then she goes to another one and another one. Around nine o’clock, she has amassed a small collection of various cheeses, and has also taken the liberty of shredding the receipts so her mother can’t reimburse her for the money spent. Halfway back to her house, she realizes she’s put it all on her debit card, and drives to the ATM for cash, returns all the cheese, and buys Kraft and Velveeta out of twisting, sour self-hatred. She also buys Wonderbread and Hershey’s; she’s in her driveway she realizes that she’s forgotten to buy the graham crackers and marshmallows. Fuck. Rose resolves to make the best grilled cheese sandwich in existence, then remembers that her mother’s stolen the panini presser in the name of science. Fuck. She’ll just fry it instead. She’s no cook, but she’s certain she can manage chunks of rubbery cheese between two slices of well-preserved white bread.

Fifteen minutes later, she chucks two sandwiches in Mutie’s food bowl and is seriously considering just boiling some eggs instead. Mutie is asleep on top of the fridge; like any good purrbeast, he’s a diurnal creature. He spends much of his waking hours frolicking around Rose’s feet and tripping her up and down stairs with delightful obliviousness obviously meant to test Rose’s coordination and ability to perform youth rolls. He is adorable. Rose likes to play with him to see her mother’s latest strange Mutie experimentations. Once she blindfolded him and he grew tentacle feelers. It’s the only change Rose ever petitioned her mother to keep; they were gone a few days later, and replaced with eyes that glowed in the dark. Right now his fur is growing patches of rainbows. He’s still her favorite cat ever. Her mother thinks that she was attached to Jaspers, but after thirteen years of Jaspers’ mausoleum—meow-so-lion? No, she doesn’t know why she thought that, what’s wrong with her?—she’s convinced Jaspers is giving her a neurotic complex of some sort. There’s no point in loving a dead thing. That’d just be silly and unproductive. Why, it’d be like being attached to the idea of dreams having some meaning, or like believing in crass superstitions like trolls being cannibals, or that parents are supposed to be there for their children during their time of need, and not off in Arizona.

Rose boils eggs, heats up her toast, and pops in a troll Errol Flynn movie. She wakes to a DVD select menu and a face full of Mutie. His claws brush against the scabs on her neck and oh, fuck, he scared her, he scared her, she’s scared. She goes up to her room without putting any of the dishes in the sink and sleeps with her head under the blanket.

She dreams, violently, of green fire and turtles and power intoxicating. There is something wrong with her, some sickness of the blood or brain. It’s not something so simple as trauma—she’s perfectly capable of psychoanalyzing herself, and self-analysis has concluded that she’ll be well and over this in another three days—but the shock of it has brought old prejudices and suspicions about this world to the forefront of her brain and it is saying to her: _this world is wrong, never mind the trolls, what if it’s you who doesn’t belong here?_ At the very end of these dreams is a glowing, white figure and a troll with hair like black, snaking tentacles, and thousands of

_(Y OU’L L COM E CR AW LIN G BA CK TO US S EE R  
AN D DON’T TH I NK WE’L L LET Y OU GO TH IS TI M E)_

bubbles, escaping from Rose’s mouth as she drowns in the dark, gasping for air, or rescue, or light.

 

*

 

On Sunday, she goes into town to buy ten copies of the local paper and run each page through with red, as though it might cause the words to spontaneously rearrange into something resembling a decent read. She’s also taken the liberty of renting several vintage horror movies, in hopes that by repeatedly exposing herself to fear, she will stop carrying her knitting needles around her house as weapons. She watches and watches and concludes:

  1. The intersection of troll and human prejudices about race and sexuality is both fascinating and depressing.
  

  2. Horror movie tropes say that attraction and horror are essentially the same thing.
  

  3. No sensible young woman should ever consider using troll horns as a sex toy. It is simply unthinkable.
  

  4. Many of these movies have strong lesbian themes, normally some variant of small plain-jane human girl from small town Kansas, engaging in dangerous romances with coifed troll flappers wearing impressive dresses and frightening heels. The human girl, depending on whether it’s a movie made by Hollywood or Trollywood, finds herself at risk of being eaten but reforms the troll and enters the troll’s “harem” (Hollywood) or the troll realizes she could just fuck the girl and leave the girl ruined for anything except another troll lover (Hollywood) or gets killed for red or pale infidelity (does it really need to be said?). Rose feels the instinctive urge to complain about the portrayal of the other in same-sex troll-human relationships, female victimhood and the nature of female subjectivity in Hollywood, and maybe write an essay on the parallels to the old mythic troll diseases and AIDS. 
  

  5. Sometimes she thinks it’s a miracle she even knows what any of these things are, growing up out in New York, but then she remembers that she’s been basically raised by the Internet. 
  

  6. Something about these movies make no sense, a gnawing wrongness in the setting, the sociopolitical mechanisms of human societies and troll society, they don’t align neatly or even at all or they are too neat, and she doesn’t know which one comes first or last or 
  

  7. Watching these trashy horror movies is reigniting her wholly intellectual crush on Troll Katharine Hepburn ( _Alternian Queen_ , _Long Night’s Journey to Day_ , a recording of _Troll Cleopatra_ , which is admittedly not so different from Shakespeare’s original) because Troll Katharine Hepburn has a peculiarly bewitching face that makes Rose want to touch it and sometimes when she’s watching those horror movies she imagines 
  

  8. In any case, her idle theoretical happenings have no right to come barging into her mind. This is to be a list populated by intellectual thoughts.
  

  9. She is also a fan of oh god no
  

  10. Bluh bluh bluh why can’t she make herself stop thinking? 
  



Rose, on a whim, waters some of the houseplants, and not once does she think, “A metamorphic howlbeast could stick its claw through the window and turn my face into spaghetti.”

 

*

 

That night, she falls asleep while watching _Intelligent Troll Interior Design Makeovers_ ; she wakes up to a rerun of _The Extreme Endeavor to Bring About A Correction Of Wardrobe and Personal Hygiene_ with a face full of shredded paper and Mutie no longer curled beneath her arm. She shuts off the television and goes to the kitchen to brew something strong—a good black leaf, or, god forbid, coffee. Mutie is on the staircase, black fur stark against the white carpet. She goes up to fetch him for another round of movies; when she picks him up, he hisses, and jolts down the stairs. How rude of him.

There are pieces of shredded newspaper in the middle of the hall upstairs. Rose pats her hair, finds it paper-free, and then squints at the tiny pile. They lead to her mother’s study.

The room itself isn’t so unusual. Her mother has lined the walls with paintings of wizards. On the top of the bookshelves are mutant cat and purrbeast skeletons, artfully arranged to look as though they are in the middle of a fight. The furniture is upholstered with a hideous, mottled pink, and the floors are covered with antique rugs. The books are shelved over a series of wine coolers. The whole ensemble has a morbid Victorian mad scientist feel to it. Adding to this is the trapdoor. Rose only notices because the rug on top is wrinkled, right over the entrance. Rose pops it open, and sees, leading straight down, a metal ladder.

What’s impressive here is that this is the second floor. Rose has no idea why her mother couldn’t just make a trap door on the first floor like a normal person. At the very bottom is a sickly, white glow that makes Rose’s stomach churn; she more or less literally feels in danger of vomiting straight down the chute, like a seasick sailor.

She doesn’t have to check for her knitting needles; they’re on her. She sticks them into the waistband of her skirt, and descends. Kitchen knives are such a gauche way of enacting self-defense, after all. And her mother needs those knives to make more of those awful, precision-cut sandwiches. Who is Rose to deny her the pleasure?

The hatch goes down for a long while. Maybe two or three stories. The rungs get colder the further she goes. The sound of her slippers against the ladder, skin and cloth against metal, echoes. And the white glow gets brighter the lower she goes. By the time Rose’s feet touch the ground, the vampire, the same one as before, is waiting for her at the doorway. She’s holding a stuffed wizard in her arms. Her black military uniform is water-stained splotchy, salted gray on the sleeves, and bloodstained to a deep forest green on the torso. A series of bullet holes and slashes have been sewn shut. Under most cases, Rose would feel some measure of sympathy. Alas, sympathy is impossible. She is too busy thinking about sticking her knitting needles into the troll’s eyes.

There are no other lights besides her. Rose can make out lab benches, desks. The air is heavy with dust and light. Rose reaches behind her, and grips her weapons. “Impassioned you greetings retrospective,” the troll says. “Kanaya maryam is name come request your ear to stretch out to me I you beg explanation.”

“I won’t ask what you’re doing here,” Rose says, in English this time. “Only that you leave.”

“Fear the rightly it is for you,” says the troll, apparently understanding English about as well as she can string a sentence together. “Prey impulse that goes fire electrically it scorches think pan flight flee regardless without nose you looked for.” It’s not so hard to decipher what she’s saying if Rose ignores the words and focuses on things like ‘prey’ _(GY RA)_ and ‘flight’ _(G YRA)_ and ‘flee’ _(G YR A G YRA GYR A)_. It’s physically painful listening to the troll. It’s like watching a YouTube video of small, starving children being kicked by the police in a dark city alleyway, and then reading the comments section: simultaneously sad and fascinating. She foregoes commentary in favor of gawking in horror as the troll continues to speak. “Long time long wind through intercessories me. Also familiar to me various configuration the trees sliceterminators of days the sun cohabitate _Nmeuh-yurkhei_ the entrance which is purr.”

“Actually,” Rose says. “His name is Jaspers.”

“Awareness little I of you came into possession through ill-starred meanings,” she says, and does not stop.

Rose is beginning to think that the problem isn’t the troll’s aural comprehension. It is one thing to treat Rose Lalonde like a snack bag. But hardly anything irks Rose more than the feeling that no one is listening to her. She is going to make one last attempt at this, she decides. And after that she is going to stab the fuck out of the troll. She steps forward, wielding the needles like short knives. “If you leave now, then neither of us will be hurt.”

The troll looks down at Rose’s needles. Her mouth quirks up into a little smile.

“I’m serious,” Rose says, and her voice pitches into a petulant, reedy whine she thought she had bred out of it. “You have long passed ‘understandably berserk with bloodlust’ and straight into ‘creepy stalker.’ My mother is friends with a troll captain, I hope you know.”

That makes the troll’s mouth settle into a little frown. Her face reminds Rose of a Byzantine portrait of a saint, long and solemn with hollowed eyes. She even has the glowing halo, for fuck’s sake. Then, slowly, she says, in accented Alternian—eastern? It sounds eastern to Rose, heavy and deliberate, like the waking of a large and heavy-jawed animal—“You speak the Standard?”

“Your powers of observation never cease to amaze me,” Rose says. “No wonder you trolls have yet to conquer the human half of the planet.”

The troll snorts. It is as though a screen has fallen down. The troll goes, immediately, from earnest to disdainful.“I now understand why you did not respond to my attempts to explain myself in English,” the troll says. “You’ve been taken by our language and charmed by our culture, and no longer understand your native tongue.”

“I can’t imagine what gave you that impression,” Rose says. “Might I suggest that you send your logic to become a circus performer?”

“I will admit to using this chance to practice my English,” the troll says. “But that does not take away my apology.”

“You call that an apology?” Rose says. “Breaking into my house and leaving the corpse of my ugly bastard child of a mother tongue at my feet?”

“I would not want to kill anyone’s custodial figure,” says the troll impatiently. “Also I have thought it over, and you are of course correct in that I should have made my intent to you clearer. In an attempt to be multicultural, I will forego the proper response for making amends and tell you that I truly am sorry for attacking you.”

“You thought I spoke Mandarin.”

“My ears are not accustomed to interpreting the noises coming from your meatflap.”

“Your windhole makes such fascinating noises as well. It’s like listening to a trombone, played by a someone who has only ever tackled a harmonica.”

The troll sniffs, and smoothes out her uniform. Flecks of dried, green blood fall to the ground. “You are launching a campaign of verbal assault.”

“I wouldn’t call it a campaign. It is a mere smattering of sarcasm-tipped arrows, loosed from the bow of my mouth. It’s a poke of the insincerity rapier to your well-rounded posterior.” Rose is tempted, for a moment, to go on. But she is not here to stand and snark. “I don’t think I have to tell you that you should leave. How did you even get down here?”

“I was exploring the dark wooded regions when I found what looked like to be a small stone memorial devoted to a stuffed purrbeast,” she says. “Beneath the peculiar stuffed purrbeast was what appeared to be a makeshift underground hive. I confirmed that it was part of the aboveground unit—”

“You dumped paper on me,” Rose says.

“I thought it would make you more comfortable,” she says. “Your fabric pile was not adequately covering your face.”

“Creepy.” Rose feels her neck for any new punctures.

“I am not one of those uncouth undead who feeds on the unconscious,” says the vampire, and all the muscles in her body seem to ripple in preparation for action. “I only came here to seek shelter. But I see that I am intruding. There are no adequate supplies of beasts to consume, either, so I will not be long here.” But she makes no motion to leave. Her fingers brush against the keyboard. She looks towards Rose, eyes bright and yellow. Her irises are green, but still speckled with gray. She can’t be much older than Rose—but that just makes it more frustrating. The troll has no idea what she’s doing to Rose: how frightening she is, how Rose can’t stop looking at her mouth. How Rose knows she can make no demands here, only a few pathetic, sad requests to leave. “I would like to ask a favor. There is a computer down here of Alternian make.”

“Oh?” Rose says.

“Do not feign ignorance with me, pink human,” the troll says, but her perfect military posture breaks at the shoulders, bends inwards like a child. “I have been in your New York since June without any contact to my unit or friends. I want to contact them.”

Rose’s jaw tightens. The name on her uniform reads “MARYAM” in tattered gold thread. The troll is watching her, ears curved towards Rose with earnest naivety, like in the troll’s world view, it’s perfectly normal to suck people’s blood, break into their houses, and still get them to do you favors. Or maybe this troll is a master manipulator, purposefully overtaxing Rose’s empathy neurons. It’s working. Rose is remembering that trolls, starting just after their second molt in their seventh sweep, are drawn into ten years of compulsory military service, with another twenty years on reserve. And that’s—pitiable? Tragic? Rose wants to set fire to her brain. Pathetic. No wonder her mother always wins these rounds of mindgames if her opponent is so easily manipulated.

So that is how Rose finds herself standing in the middle of her mother’s dusty underground lab, fiddling with a computer from the nineties. The computer itself is a plain Windows 95 box, but the screen is enormous, the exact image of the massive, evil supercomputers Rose used to see in cartoons, before she stopped watching them (”Cartoons are for children, dear,” her mother would say, and she’d say, “I’m ten,” and in reply: “Old enough to start knowing what is real and what isn’t.”) The screen extends from the ceiling to the top of the desk. The keyboard is an old, yellowed white IBM model, comically tiny next to the monitor. The puck mouse has apparently been stolen from an iMac. At the very edge of the troll’s luminescent glow is a pink bedspread and a tea set. Rose is certain that her mother left it there to mock her. ‘So at long last you have found my secret hideout, darling. I don’t understand what took you so long. Did you not see the suggestions? All the wizards point right down this hatch.’ She is going to check it, if she makes it out of here—which she probably will, this troll is surprisingly friendly—if the wizard statues, indeed, all face this hatch. She is going to find this out and then she is going to write six sestinas about the joys of tea cozies. She is going to submit it to her school’s literary magazine and no one is going to know what to do with it and they’ll send it back asking her to cut out half of the words like they always do.

The computer takes a while to boot up. The vampire troll drums her fingers against the desk.

“After this,” Rose says, “I hope that you’ll go to Canada.”

“Hrmm,” the troll says. “I like the TV programs here better.”

“You watch TV?”

“Sometimes I watch from the bushes. My favorite programs are the ones where many pink human women who have formed a legal bond with off-screen men sit and talk to the camera in incomprehensible accents. The interview segments are then interspersed with hypothetical scenarios of them shopping, having parties, and getting into fights. I thought that the fights are either a kind of human mating ritual, but they never kiss.” The log-in screen is of a picture of a blonde baby, scowling at the camera. The troll lets out an embarrassed guffaw on Rose’s behalf. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.”

“That’s not me,” Rose says.

“Oh?”

“I have a twin brother in Texas,” she says. “It could just as easily be him.” It’s not, though. They both know this. The troll smiles, a little bit, and says nothing.

Rose doesn’t have to take many guesses to crack the password. She gets it right on the first try: 12041995. Her birthday. Just like her mother to do that: set up a ridiculously fortressed computer system, and then make the password something so basic that any idiot could guess their way in. The fan whirs to life as the computer loads the desktop. Rose gets up and lets the troll take the seat.

“I forget that you humans emerge from one another’s bodies,” the troll says while they wait for the desktop to populate with icons. “Like hairless, parasitic monkeys. You don’t molt, just grow and grow and grow.” The troll is too tall for the desk. She has to stoop her back and bend her shoulders in to type. They are now waiting for the web browser to fire up. Rose can see the troll trying her best to be patient, but her claws click, click, click, and suddenly she won’t stop talking. “Your parents are not home, something that I understand is not typical for human parents to do, since they are normally—”

“My mother is in a conference in Arizona.” And, because Rose is used to people knowing her mother, she says, “She’s a xenobiologist. As far as I know, she specializes in physiology and genetics, though she makes a constant mockery of the idea of specialization by skipping around from one field to another until she has a single gold ingot in every fire.”

“I don’t keep track of these scientific happenings, but I’m certain she is very talented.”

“You don’t know that,” Rose says, harshly.

“It was meant as a compliment. I do not see why you have to take offense. My lusus was very beautiful. I was happy when people complimented her. It reflected well on me.”

Rose looks for any sign or twitch of insincerity or falsehood in the troll’s face. Mostly, she sees annoyance with old technology. “You are disgustingly sentimental.”

“I am trying to make this a pleasant experience for us both—I know what you are going to say—” Rose bares her neck, and taps the two puncture wounds, and the troll flushes mossy green and barrels on. “—but I can see that you are not making any effort yourself.”

“Can you blame me?” Rose says.

“Other trolls have done worse things. I didn’t even kill anyone you knew.” But it’s said with a breezy detachment, as though it’s not how she really feels. Rose should hope that’s not how this troll feels. Talking with her isn’t so bad. Under different circumstances, they could have been

_(BRIG HT)_

friends, pomposity matched by verbosity; the question is, of course, which of them is the pompous one. Rose reaches below the desk and gives the computer a little push. The monitor flickers. The internet loads. The troll types, waits for a website, types more, waits for more websites. In the end, she logs onto a chatroom, types some things, and waits for a reply. She breaks the mouse in sheer frustration.

“Excuse me,” Rose says, reflexively.

“It’s not as though it was being useful,” says the troll, glowering at its remains in her hands. She types some more. Rose has a full view of the answers—hard not to, really, when the monitor is eight feet tall and obnoxiously… bright—and questions:

Requesting Information On P5u32 Southbysoutheast Desert Center Cheesemongers  
perished  
Seeking Threshecutioner P32u9 Northnorth Oceansea Fourth Island From The Right Nookwhiffers  
desk duty  
Kanaya Maryam Request Reentry  
no such person  
Requesting Reentry followed by a long noun phrase with numbers tacked onto it and an explicative.  
location request  
Inquire Location Request  
that's not very polite why don’t you just answer the question so you can spare us the trouble of having to hunt your undead facegash and sending it to glubbing hell

Rose yanks the plug out of the computer. The mouse, still in the troll’s hand, turns to a shattered mess of broken plastic.

“Are you all right?” Rose says, and it is official, she has Stockholm’s, she is sympathizing with a monster and god help her, it feels perfectly rational to her. The troll is silent. She pulverizes the mouse into even tinier bits of plastic and parts. Rose, because she is not a heartless wench, reaches over to pat the troll on the shoulder. “I’ll give you a moment,” she says.

The lab benches are covered with black tarp. No unsightly lab equipment has been left lying around. Rose has no idea what this is doing down here, but it doesn’t surprise her at all. Why, when she is thirty or forty, she is going to build a library in the sky and challenge her mother—or her daughter? Does she want one?—to find it. And no one will be able to, because it will be digital, encrypted, and possibly cursed. Or maybe she’ll just move her books to an arcane storage facility in Alexandria, New York.

The light grows dimmer. Rose looks up—and sees the troll getting up from the desk and moving deeper into the lab. She is also the only light source in the lab. Rose rocks onto the balls of her feet—but the troll is leaving, yes? That is a good thing, yes? Yes. Yes. It grows dimmer and darker around her. In the distance, Rose hears footfalls, and then stone sliding against stone. Rose waits in the dark for a long while, then, one arm stuck out in front of her, navigates to the bright square of light shining from her mother’s study. The needles jab at her side as she makes her ascent. She plucks them out of her waistband and lets them drop.

Useless things. She doesn’t know why she thought they could protect her. She gets a bottle of wine from her mother’s wine cooler and finishes two glasses before throwing up into a toilet.

 

*

 

\--pesterlog--  
\--tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG]\--

TT: If you never see or hear from me again, then I thought you should know that I have had altercations with a vampiric troll while my mother was busy throwing hotel room scientist parties in Phoenix.  
TT: Two altercations, actually.  
TT: Did you know they call their vampires ‘rainbow drinkers’? It makes sense, yet I can’t help but think that it seems more like the name of a gay bar.  
TG: sup lalonde  
TG: yeah the wood paneling of rainbow drinkers is doing it for me  
TG: along with the picture of giant bullcock  
TG: although you know the bars down here all have names like steers and queers or ass-o lasso  
TG: im grinding against some old dude who kinda looks like you  
TG: my incestuous throbbing cock is erect and ready for your analysis  
TG: whats up  
TT: I’m being serious.  
TG: ok ok  
TG: rainbow drinking troll encounters  
TG: guess things arent hot and steamy up in fair new york  
TG: bodices ripping in a twenty mile radius  
TT: I’ve taken nine years of Alternian, but even though I can order hoofbeast piss with my cuttlefish jelly from any Alternian restaurant I wish, it apparently hasn’t taught me anything about how to actually deal with a troll who thinks that your think pan is the size of a skillet, and your neck as the thin barrier between her and her next meal.  
TT: At any moment now, I could be spirited away, like a bag of Fruit Gushers tossed haphazardly into someone’s lunchbox, rattling my way along to swift, pointless, and painless death.  
TG: lalonde amuse-bouche  
TT: Yes, exactly.  
TT: Eyeball vitreous for your little mouth amusement. Fried tongue appetizers. If tough muscle isn’t to your taste,  
TT: we’ll also serve baked ears, soft as jelly!  
TT: Why don’t we start drawing up the menu for the main course and dessert? Or are you feeling squeamish?  
TT: Let us engage in the proud humanistic tradition of murder, madness, and death by prions.  
TT: Shit, bro, let’s be cannibals.  
TG: fuck rose calm down  
TG: im sorry im the king of douches  
TG: whats wrong  
TT: …  
TG: …  
TG: youve been typing for a long time man  
TG: what kind of message am I going to get  
TG: it better be incredible  
TT: I’m sorry for worrying you. It’s nothing.  
TG: cmon rose were bros  
TG: sis and bro  
TG: half sis half bro  
TG: fuck i dont have a clue how that weird biological shit works but if youre in a bad jam youre my best bud in smuppet butt and frenulum licking  
TT: I’ve got to go.  
TG: rose im trying goddamnit  
TG: but fine whatever  
TG: do the running thing  
TG: ill just be out here in texas being hip to that groove jam  
TT: ‘Groove jam,’ Dave? It’s like you’ve been Rip van Winkle’d from the 70s.  
TT: I’ll leave you to make ten of your ironic white boy rap YouTube videos that garner a whole of eight views, three of them from your Internet sockpuppets.  
TT: Good night, brother dearest.  
TG: fuck you lalonde  
TG: my raps are amazing  
TG: i have seventytwo hits on vimeo  


\--tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG]\--

 

*

 

When her mother finally does return, Rose has stopped watching TV and moved onto finishing her knitting projects. She’s left two freshly knit cardigans in her mother room, the one where she dropped stitches in every row prettied up with a bow and the one when she finally pooled her composure back into her body and brain folded up and tossed onto the bed just sloppily enough to make it seem like Rose doesn’t care. Her mother has brought back various cacti from Arizona. Of course one of them is shaped like a wizard. Her life and interests are just a colossal joke to her mother, ha, ha, ha. Rose draws a little face on the cactus while her mother takes her bags upstairs. Because she’s not twelve, she does not draw an enormous phallus onto its groin.

When her mother returns to the living room, she peers at Rose’s little additions to the wizard cactus and says, “Oh, how creative of you! Have you ever considered a career as an artist? In case the other things don’t work out.”

“I’m sure if I can’t cut it as a psychology professor at Harvard, I’ll find another way to get by,” Rose says. She pets the cactus, miscalculates, and ends up with a fingerful of needles. “I’ll become a lady of the night and move to Vegas, where it’s legal.” And where trolls burn in desert sunlight.

“A lady of the night? Oh, no, darling,” her mother says. “I’d much rather you become a kept woman. I like those sweaters you made for me.”

“They’re not sweaters,” Rose says. “They open in the front. They’re cardigans.”

“I will buy you a flock of woolbeasts and a shepherd. Only the best for my little girl.” She reaches out, strokes Rose’s cheek. She takes Rose’s hand and, gently, plucks out the needles, one by one. “Were you lonely while I was gone?”

“Like a rabbit, I was dying of heartbreaking loneliness the entire time.”

Her mother goes to the kitchen to pick up the first aid kit, and returns with a pony band-aid and a martini. She wraps it around Rose’s finger, and everything is saccharine sweet and Rose can taste the message beneath it: become more self-sufficient, stop injuring yourself on plant life. Outside, small, fluffy birds weigh down branches, and then, with little jerks of their heads, fly away.

“Mother,” she says. She is going to mention the lab. She is going to tell her mother to padlock the mausoleum. She is going to ask what kind of ridiculous hoops her mother had to jump through to build a trapdoor on the second story. She is going to faint dramatically over the trapdoor one night and when her mother comes to wake her, accuse her mother of being a mad scientist.

“My little Rosebud.” And then, her voice thickened to a murmur with sideways kindness, she says, “You don’t know how much I wish I didn’t have to leave you.”

It must be the jetlag, because her mother seems almost sincere. Rose doesn’t respond, not to the flocks of sheep or the horrid nickname that she’s sure is a reference to _Citizen Kane_ , or the false words from her mother’s mouth. Her mother’s hand moves from her hand to her face to her hair, fingers massaging her scalp with ironic comfort—Rose closes her eyes, and chooses to believe.


	3. Interlude. Speaker: Ride a nightmare into the Green Sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If writing self-indulgent interludes in the style of medieval romances is wrong, I don't ever want to be right.

_How Doctor Lalonde came to find tutors for her daughter; how Rose came to enjoy the company of her tutors; how she came to be rejected by this tutor; how she returned to her home_

I.

Our noble ladies and lords of the Circle, here begins the romance of Rose Lalonde and Her Chariot. For in those days, it was typical for a human to ride metal chariots and own them, much as we would own and covet a magnificent ghastlyrider or a nightmare. Our dear Seer, lovely and sharp, was then fifteen, ready to prove herself ready for responsibility, for it was the custom then to require licenses to operate metal, motorized chariots on the open road.

Alas, our lovely Doctor Lalonde has much to do with her life, and has no time to teach her daughter the honorable arts of chariot rearing and raising. She offers the duty to her proteges in an advanced xenophysiology course in exchange for additional points on a future examination; and so there is a team of eight tutors, one to help her acquire her permit, six to watch her drive the required supervised hours, and one who will take her to the actual licensing examination. The Seer, with lusty heart and stout courage, applies herself to the study of acquiring her provisionary license. Her first tutor finds himself bereft of work; the Seer—so smart! such within her a darkling heart!—dismisses him.

We won’t presume to bore you with the details of her second and third tutor, both graduate students of Doctor Lalonde’s. They are roommates, deeply in love, and have made their best and favorite hobby swiving. One is from New Jersey, the other is from Vermont; their bond is one forged over ice cream, television, and benzyols. Bless their souls!

 

II.

And so the weeks pass. The fourth tutor takes her place in the chariot. It would be impossible to make a list of all of her attributes; her elegantly negligent hair, her lips, in a perpetual state of shedding, her fine, spiffing threads and the dagger shoes. She is hoping to become a doctor; ten years from hence, she will be deployed to an American military base in southern Alternia, and shot through the shoulder during a routine training exercise. As she bleeds out, she will encounter the first and last sighting of a proper Alternian metamorphic cluckbeast. She will, bravely, extract a genetic sampling from the metamorphic cluckbeast, and make several important contributions to the fields of xenobiology, Alternian philosophy, and ectomorphology—so accomplished! Our Seer knows how to choose well.

But today the Fourth Tutor is a young woman with a pierced tongue and a poor grade in Doctor Lalonde’s xenobiology courses, XBIO 143A, Advanced Mechanics of Theoretical Ectobiology. She cares not one whit about Doctor Lalonde’s little girl. When our Seer—our poor, little girl—rests her eyes upon the Fourth Tutor, she lets out a gasp and staggers, as though she were struck through the breast. It is only her second, or perhaps third, notable moment of attraction for a living being. For you see, our Seer has nursed many intellectual crushes upon the dead, not in a necrophillic manner—no, we apologize. We forgot necrophilia is not a Thing in your culture. We understand you very well. The Seer has loved the dead for a good part of her life, as all small girls do, yes, and this enflamed passion for the, ah, venerable and aged has stifled her love for the living form and body. For some people love best a pert chest or a well-descended set of testes; our Seer has, for years, loved what she could envision in her mind, though she was sure to leave educational pamphlets beneath the Doctor’s door: “How To Come To Terms With Your Child’s Sexuality,” “When Your Daughter Expresses Trollish Desires But Without The Quadrants, Just The Whole Not Liking Guys Much Or Exclusively Thing,” and “Is It The Same Thing As A Spotted Zebra? Unfortunate Animal Metaphors And Why You Should Not Apply Them To Your LGBTQ Child.”

The Doctor, so moved, laminated and framed these pamphlets to the wall for the edification of all visitors in her house. Such magnanimity of spirit! Such devotion to pedagogy and parenting! These displays of pure, mother-daughter love do make me faint. … Yes, your excellencies. We do suppose gender and sex are not Things you do, either. Our songs are silly little ditties that should go forever unheard, the vibrations from our larynxes emptying into the wastelands of His Frogginess. We shall ride our nightmares into the fires of the Green Sun if we continue to anger you. Naturally.

 

III.

We will not presume that your most high ladies and lords have any interest in the courtship—terrible, brief, unworthy of even our poorest of descriptions. But truly, it was a disaster of poor rhetorical seduction, Freudian slips, a triumph of id over superego; the Seer, in sheer desperation, went to the Knight for an eloquent elucidation on the ways of courtship, both honorable and dishonorable—and go straight to the part where the tutor takes a fleeting moment’s pity on her horrendously awkward charge and takes her to a party. Our honored Seer comes expecting alcohol, beer kegs, a house too full to move through, and strip poker. She gets hooka, alcohol, and tedious round after round of Clue. The evening wears on. Tutor four notices the Seer’s lipstick, borrowed from the Doctor, and the bony swell of a single knee. The Seer, through drunken powers of seduction, gets a mouthful of Fourth Tutor’s tongue. It is while the Fourth Tutor is charting the formerly unexplored contours of the Seer’s tonsils that she realizes she is drunkenly entangled with the Doctor’s teenage doctor, and quickly flees from the room and then the house, leaving our Seer stranded some miles from home. Our Seer resigns herself to sexual frustration and calls a taxi back home. The Doctor approaches the Seer; they both stink of bad wine, yet only the Seer’s lipstick is smeared. The Doctor asks, “Why didn’t you drive back, love?” As to which the Seer replies, “I have not acquired my license yet.” “Goodness, is that true?” the Doctor replies. “I had completely forgotten.” And now, our gracious lords and ladies of the Noble Circle, we entreat for your opinions. Who here has it worse: Rose Lalonde, her mother, or the—

Yes, we understand. We will begin anew. Let us open another chapter in this book. This one is called, _The Distress of Rose Lalonde Upon the Death of Her Cat_ —

 

_N OT EN OU G H_   
_NE V ER EN O U GH_   
_KIL L TH E TR A IT OR R IP MA I M_   
_HU RT SUFF ER SU F FE R S UFF ER_

_UNSAT IS FY ING S TO RY S O UN SAT IS FYIN G_   
_DO YO U KNO W WH A T W E D O TO SPEA KE RS WH O DIS PLE AS E US_   
_W ELL SPE AKE R_   
_UNL E SS YOU W OU LD PRE F E R_   
_NO T T O PRE SU ME_

 

_NOW WH E R E IS OU R SE COND SPE AK ER  
 _S HE IS KE EPI NG US WA IT ING_ _


	4. Rose: Have a merry Christmas.

She is having night terrors again. The usual sort: green, plasma fire, groping shadows, standing in her house and seeing not the barren winter landscape, but light raining down from a patchy sky. Sometimes she sees castles and a woman without a face bleeding onto a scarf, and something in her twists, goes tight, and then with a wild, screaming snap, breaks free. Sometimes she sees the vampire, her mouth curved into a terrific, blinding smile.

According to popular trollish mythology and Hollywood movies, rainbow drinkers have unusual effects on the minds of their victims. Compliancy, hypnosis, outright seduction. Rose isn’t so inclined to believe them—she’s read the studies that say that trollish psychic powers are much less effective on humans than they are on other trolls, and assumes the same follows for their rainbow drinkers—and prefers a much simpler explanation: her imagination is frighteningly active, and she read too much of _Beyond The Veil_ as a middle schooler.

She’s still fond of that book. It’s not nearly as dense nor obscure as people make it out to be. Its narrative is multilinear, yes, and involve frequent time loops—the main plot is about the outer reaches of the dreamscape, or maybe it’s about a boy building an enormous house, or a girl on an island being raised by a dog. But a big part of it is people trapped in an asteroid at the end of the world dreaming about other things at the end of the world and going back in time to correct wrongs and now that she’s tried to explain the plot, it seems silly beyond words, and just a bit trashy. Once, she would have admired the twists and paths of the narrative. Now she can’t even stand to think of it.

The betrayal isn’t that she grew up and learned that wizards are not real. She has always known wizards to be mere fiction. The betrayal is a much plainer, simpler one: she has primed herself for a world that will make sense. Life begins, life ends, and ideally there is something in the middle. God knows what it’s supposed to be. Rose is trapped in the throes of white bourgeois malaise. How predictable. How expected. How dull. Some people smoke, some people drink; Rose Lalonde, at one point, liked pretending to be a wizard orbiting a green sun.

She is beginning to enjoy these dreams, but she is real, and they are not, and that is all there is to it. Rose cannot become a wizard, but she’ll be damned if she can’t become _(GY RA GYR A GYRA OU R LITT L E GIR L)_ a vampire slayer.

 

*

Rose knows it’s becoming a problem when she watches _Twilight_ and all of its sequels, both the troll and the human versions for research purposes. Humans, she tells herself, are infatuated with danger. Thus, Bella Swan, bungee jumping, and driving ninety miles per hour on a downward mountain curve. She has _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on her Netflix queue. She is two months away from hanging garlic from her windows and painting her windowsill in indigo grubpaint. Why, two years from now, she anticipates she’ll be running about Moonyglen, California, wielding a chainsaw and a flamethrower in her hunt for the heads of the undead.

She doesn’t tell her mother about the mausoleum. Nor does she padlock the entrance. She does set up little hidden cameras and inspects the footage nightly with the feverish determination of a government conspiracy theorist. It becomes something of a hobby: she sits, she watches, she thinks up elaborate commentary: “Why, yes, Mr. Ironic Rabbit, this is a whorl of dust, dancing across the screen. And I do believe that is pixilation on the upper right hand corner.” When this loses its novelty, she fast-forwards through the footage, always watchful for the ghastly white glow. It doesn’t come.

Christmas season arrives, in shambles, to the house, complete with the annual parade of door-to-door carolers. Her mother invites them in and forces Rose to listen to them. Sometimes her mother serves tea and gin; one of the carolers gets drunk, and treats Rose to an off-key, flirtatious rendition of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” By the time Rose is on Christmas break, her mother is grading final exams, martini replaced with a tumbler of whiskey. Mutie keeps his funny walrus tusk mutation for nearly two weeks, and needs to be handfed because he can’t close his mouth. Rose makes a papier-mâché cat for her mother, and sends Dave and his brother (which makes him her brother, but not quite—how _do_ these mechanics work?) hideous sweaters of birds wearing bomber jackets. She receives from Dave a bottle of wine that she suspects might be filled with urine. For once, she wakes up on Christmas without being buried in boxes. Rose spends the rest of the day browsing websites and thinking of the next chapter of her wizard story. She’s included, in exacting detail, the decapitation of multiple vampires.

Two thousand words later, it’s sunset, and her mother’s up in her room with a dress on a hanger. Diamonds hang from her ears and throat, and she is wearing a black dress like a knife’s sheath. Rose’s dress, she notes, is white. It’s the same battle as always, then. Rose’s mother is trying to make a point about how they’re not so different by putting them in opposite-color dresses, and arranging for some absurd gift that creates some utterly false bond between them, god knows what it is or will be.

“Merry Christmas, Rose,” her mother says. “Your present is waiting downstairs.”

“I’ll be sure to treat it well,” Rose says, with a grimace. She suspects it’s another pony. Her mother, since her twelfth birthday, has gifted her with a horse or pony, no matter how many times Rose insists that she does not want them; as such, Rose has, for years, been obligated to go down to the stables and not only brush each one individually, but clothe herself in riding clothes and make use of the three years of riding lessons she took when she went through a high fantasy phase with her preferred literature. She has a schedule: Eight Inches Unicorn Hair Core Yew Slightly Swishy on the first weekend of the month; King Oenomaus The Undying Slayer Of Suitors on the second; Woebegone Conditions Of Repeated Familial Interactions on the third; and Independent Free Thinking Woman on the fourth. She hoped her mother would stop with the horses once she reached driving age. She’s tired of looking up at lists of race horse names for inspiration. Every year she gets one step closer to naming one Slap Happy Bringing Home The Bacon, and she’s not sure how her dignity will survive. “Shall I stock up on my supplies of hay and alfalfa?”

“No, darling,” her mother says. “Now be quick about it. You don’t want to keep our guests waiting.”

The dress is full of ruffles, layers, and has not just one train, but three. This is not the tackiest thing her mother has ever put her in—there are embarrassing photographs of Rose’s eighth birthday party that Rose has doggedly tried to wipe out of existence, but she hasn’t found the negatives, so her mother always has a new, elaborately framed photo on her desk, no matter how many copies she burns—but it’s certainly one that has Rose convinced that whatever is waiting for her is not an animal.

Rose makes no ceremony about going down the stairs like her mother might. She hikes her skirt up around her ankles, sidesteps Mutie, and descends at a brisk clip. When she arrives at the bottom, her mother steers a rustblooded troll in a threshecutioner’s dress uniform to her. The troll has the most vicious slouch Rose has ever seen, as though he’s trying to stab people with his shoulder blades. He’s short for a troll, only about as tall as her most esteemed mother. He’s contorted his face into a closed-mouthed scream of frustration. The white threads on his breast reads “VANTAS.”

This is the strangest present Rose has ever received, and this is including the post-postmodernist family wax models. She has an image of her life rolling down a steep hill, like a little katamari. Her life is a tiny little ball of crap, tearing grass out of the ground, gaining mass as it swallows up shrews and squirrels, moving onto rabbits, miniature ponies, and then cows and tractors. The person pushing it isn’t Rose—oh, no, she’s been smushed in with the rest a long while ago—but a tentacled horror monster, singing cheery songs as it barrels down the mountain.

“Merry Christmas,” her mother says in Alternian.

“Happy nondenominational secular winter solstice, mother,” Rose says. “Might I inquire as to who our guest is?”

“Oh, darling,” her mother says. From the living room, Rose can see the familiar silhouette of her mother’s troll friend. She’s planning on nicknaming him someday, something other than ‘captain.’ She will find a way to make it scathing yet subtle and even a little sweet. “Don’t you recognize each other? I was sure that you two had struck up a correspondence over the military channels in my lab.”

Rose doesn’t miss the way her mother’s fingers curl around the stem of the martini glass, like an anaconda curling around a branch. “He’s less than what I expected,” Rose says, and the troll’s cheeks puff.

“Well, it’s only natural,” her mother says. “I don’t see why you children have gone back to chatting without a video feed. It’s so primitive. But the surprise of finding out who the other person on the screen looks like! Of course you’re in shock.” Her mother’s troll friend gets up and links arms with her mother; he’s newly missing an eye. His two rows of teeth flash in the lamplight. “The captain and I,” her mother says, “are going to do some collaborative science in my office—” Oh, god, why did her mother tell her that? “—I’ll leave you two to your own devices. Don’t get in any trouble, dear.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rose says. Her mother flashes them a smile on her way up the stairs. Her troll friend gives them one, too, but he looks mostly horrendously aroused. Rose listens to their footsteps retreating to the confines of her mother’s office, and then it’s just her and the rustblood troll. He doesn’t look very strong, but Rose has had enough experience with trolls to know that their strength can’t be measured by eye. They watch each other, wearily. His eyes are far brighter than the rust uniform might suggest. Rose is tempted to turn back up the stairs and leave him in her living room, but that would be so terribly rude, and there is a chance that her mother is making out with the captain in the middle of the hall.

“I don’t even know who you are,” Rose says.

“Well, congratulations, asshole,” he says. “Because I was told this would be an opportunity to prove my amazing threshing skills on something, and instead here I am in a freakish human hive with nothing to thresh but some pasty human! Please tell me this is a test and you have something for me to cut.”

“I do have an enormous leg of ham in the fridge, but I doubt even my mother would ironically bring over a member of a foreign military just to cut cooked meat,” Rose says. She frowns. “There are condoms in your pockets. I suggest you hide them before you acquire a reputation for being desperate.”

He pulls out the wad of condoms. They weren’t there when he first arrived; her mother must have slipped them in on her way up the stairs. “Where the fuck did these come from?” He tears one packet open, and stares at it. “This is one of your latex fucking balloons.”

“We could always use a bucket, if you’d prefer,” she says.

“You demented, sick fuck, I hope your shame globes swell and give you a rash.”

“Luckily for the both of us,” she says, “I have zero sexual interest in you and your blunt skull protrusions, so rest assured, there will be no use of our delightful human fucking balloons.” For fuck’s sake, she looks like a cross between a bridal shop and every single junior prom dress that has ever graced her high school’s gym floor. She has never felt less sexy in her life.

“Like I’d ever want your ugly human face near my buge,” he snaps, and tucks his hands into his armpits. “Do you even speak English or are you rampaging through our language and reaming it through your hideous foodmasher?”

“My accent has made full-grown trolls cry in envy,” Rose says. “I have left many a troll weeping into their own chests, slain by the perfection of my voiceless epiglottal fricatives.”

“What the fuck is that?” he says. He looks around the house, then settles on glaring at the trees outside. “I don’t see how you humans are even alive when you live in a death trap like that.”

“I wasn’t aware that we had anything more intimidating than feral chickens,” Rose says. “But feel free to enlighten me.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” Vantas barks. “I wouldn’t have thought that you pathetic, shitstained humans would have anything out here, either! You’re soft and have hideous, freakish blood, and your jaws wouldn’t be able to break through an inch of chalk, never mind something actually worth eating. But you see those hideous, withered arboreal arms, human? Those creaky fingers strangled the life right out of one of my best friends’ entire unit. It’s a fucking tragedy.”

“How terrible.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, I mean it,” Rose says. “It must have been difficult for you, especially given your naturally abrasive personality. If you would like to talk about it, then I can make us some tea.” And mine your brain. She can smell his inferiority complexes from here: his red blood, nubby little horns, short height, the way he seems be teetering dangerously close to blowing an aneurysm at any given moment. Maybe her mother really did put some thought into this present. It has been a while since she’s had any success with psychoanalyzing Mutie.

His eyes bug. He sucks in a deep breath, muscles in his gray face start twitching. “Tell me I didn’t just hear those words come out of your mouth,” he says, hoarse.

“Are you deaf? Would you like me to provide you with Q-tips and maybe a bottle of oil so you do not find yourself flattened by some tremendously loud truck? Would you like me to clean your ears for you, since you are apparently unable to do so yourself?”

“I already have a moirail, you pale temptress.”

“My sympathies for you are so divorced from the realm of the romantic that I daresay my bloodgusher is in very real danger of turning to dust from disuse,” she says. “We might as well make the best of this situation. Here I am, offering you a chance to unburden your sordid troubles onto my frail, but willing, human shoulders. If you are really so set on your romantic ways, then you may think of this as a one-time affair.”

“Have you never once watched a movie in your life?” he says. “Any time someone says that, it’s like a ticket for the universe to pretzel itself like a fucking contortionist to lick its elbow.”

“Oh, please,” Rose says. “Grow up.”

His eyes are narrow, red and yellow slits. Finally he sighs. “Lead me down the hellish, plasmic roads of pale infidelity, frail human,” he says. She lets him have the chaise longue while she takes the two-seat sofa. They’re separated by a glass coffee table. This year her mother has stocked the table with back issues of _National Geographic_ and a large book filled with vintage black and white photographs of naked women—a jibing reference, Rose is sure, to her sexuality—in various poses, and several books filled with baby endangered animals. Rose picks up a pen lying on the side and opens a book with cheetah cubs to the back cover.

 _The Case of Mr. Vantas, Threshecutioner in the Alternian Imperial Army_ , she writes. _Anger issues; inferiority complex; possibly not given enough love from his lusus?_

“What the fuck are you writing?” Vantas says. He is sitting up, feet on the ground, hands gripping the upholstery.

“The date,” she says. “Lie down, Mr. Vantas. You mentioned a friend who recently passed away. Does this friend have a name?”

“Of course she had a name, you racist asshole,” he says. “Do you think I ask that about you humans? Does your lusus have a name? Do you have a name? Or do you all just call yourselves, ‘Hey, Grubmuncher!’ and ‘You There With The Defective Face!’?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

His face scrunches up in annoyance, or maybe genuine pain of recollection. “You have to understand,” he says, “you solicitous taintstained conciliatory wench, my moirail’s a homicidal jugaloo who starts playing whack-a-grub every time he starts thinking about how truly shitty this planet is. I can’t go around taking care of everyone’s rage diarrhea even if I wanted to. But she was my best friend. My other best friend. Sollux is in a coma, and his moirail’s flounced off somewhere and no one’s seen her since. It’s like the universe said, ha, ha, Karkat! You want friends, let’s kill them all or make them disappear!”

“Quite remarkable,” Rose says. “But you are still sidestepping.”

“Fuck you,” he says. “I was getting to that part.”

 _Avoiding the issue_ , she writes. _Sensitive to pain?_

“How are you slandering my name this time, you hideous monkey?”

“Merely a few heroic couplets to keep myself amused,” she says. “Are we at that part yet where you regale me with the names of your dead friends, or do I have to suffer through your diatribes until the sun rises? I charge by the hour, Mr. Vantas.”

“You’re getting off from this, aren’t you? Oh my god, I’m trapped in your sick, depraved pale fantasies. What did I ever do to deserve this?” Vantas wiggles his toes, and lets out a dramatic, theatrical sigh. “Her name was Kanaya.”

Rose looks up, sharply. He’s kidding her. She knows that name. She’s gone to bed with “Kanaya Maryam” in her head, in some twisted attempt to instill a revenge drive into her brain. She understands now. Her mother must have seen the logs of the vampire’s attempt to reach home, and brought over the threshecutioner she tried to reach. Rose, for a moment, allows herself a spot of pity. A second later, she realizes she’s not feeling pity for Vantas, but for the vampire.

The universe _is_ trying to lick its own elbow. And it is succeeding.

“What is she like?” Rose says.

“Dead now, asshole. A rotting corpse in the middle of backass nowhere.”

“My apologies. I meant what _was_ she like. Just as a way of helping you process.”

He fidgets. Then he says, “She was—she listened to me and didn’t make me feel like a total shitstain. She was—a freak of nature, she used to lie out in the sun and let herself get toasty. She liked dumb human things like clothes and needles and trashy rainbow drinker novels. The last time I saw her, she said if she made it out of the army alive, she’d move to your shitty glass clusterfuck island you call Manhattan and design useless things for the rest of her life. Sometimes, I think my friends are all the people who were born with empty think pans and marked for death! And I spend so much time trying to tell them, ‘No, Terezi, ranting about how the world is just a shitty dream we all have to wake up from so we can cross over to the other side will just get you culled, don’t turn this into the world’s lamest knock-knock joke, only human grubs do that’ and ‘Murder isn’t fucking liberation, it’s murder!’—shit, who knows what Gamzee’s gotten into while I’ve been wasting my time in this hellhole?” He tucks his chin into his chest. His brows are drawn low over his eyes, hand covering his cheek and fingers over his mouth. “I always thought—there’s a statistic, seven out of ten trolls don’t make it to their tenth sweep—I thought if I tried hard enough, I could get us through it, but then they started dying and disappearing and they didn’t stop. At least, Kanaya should have—I don’t want to die alone, I just want everyone to be okay, I just want everything to be okay—”

He’s pressing the heel of his palm into his forehead, shoulders scrunched into two crumbling mountains around his head. Rose’s pen has sunk into the spine of the book. She sees a boy just her age, trained to kill, so many of his friends dead or taken to places he can’t follow. It’s the kind of malaise the elderly get, if they reach a certain age. Maybe it’s a good thing she never had many friends. Rose thinks—with her temper, if she were to lose any of them—she thinks about Dave dying, and her fingers curl around her pen. She thinks about her mother dying, and her jaw clenches. They are not good at loving, the two of them. When some people speak of shadows, they talk of clouds blocking the sun in midday, and when Rose says, _shadow_ she means rivers running in underground caves, so dark that fish go blind for want of light. Rose doubts she will ever go on a rampage, but she knows she’s capable of it. And she knows that she would want to. Rose tears off a square of her dress, and passes it over. He blows red into the scrap of cloth, and cries into his sleeves.

 

*

 

They spend the rest of the night on the couch watching Lakiva Shimke movies. She learns that his proper name is Karkat, not that she’s allowed to call him that, and he hopes she dies in a vat of acid. Rose suspects that they’ll never talk to one another again. It’s a vacation friendship, more open and deeper than normal because you’ll never see or write to one another again. It’s not so bad. Rose is going to tell Dave, “My mother got me a troll for Christmas” and he’ll probably ask why she couldn’t have just asked for a centaur or a mail order bride. She makes popcorn. Upstairs, she can hear the shower running. Vantas has opened all of the condoms, and blows and twists them into shapeless lumps that he insists on calling animals. They debate the sociological significance in calling a cat a centipede for a while until Vantas gets too angry to say any other words and Rose gets bored.

When it is nearing midnight and they can’t agree on which of Shimke’s movies to watch next, they flip to Netflix.

“Holy fuck,” he says. He wrests the remote from her. “Do you watch anything other than shitty rainbow drinker movies?”

“I am fond of early twentieth century European cinema,” Rose says. “Blame the French.”

“This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” He’s browsing through her viewing history. Rose knows better than to be ashamed. She crosses her arms and waits until he gets bored. It has to happen eventually, she thinks. “A documentary on rainbow drinkers? Has your oversized skull bonked your brain one too many times and led you to believe they’re real?”

“Aren’t they, though?” Rose says. “I was laboring under the assumption that the undead were a thing on Troll Earth. Sorry, Alternia.”

“Show some cultural sensitivity,” he says. “And no, there aren’t any of these dumbfuck rainbow drinkers on Alternia. Listen up, you ignorant woman: the only kinds of undead on Alternia are psychic echoes possessing corpses. All of that rainbow drinking and metamorphic howlbeasts stuff is so unbelievable that you’d have to be functionally retarded to believe in any of it.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Rose says. She wonders, not for the first time, if she should tell him about Maryam’s revival—but it seems cruel to tell him this when there’s no hope for revival or even finding Maryam, and especially when Rose is either going to ship Maryam to Alaska or kill her. Mourning someone and then learning they’ve returned as a member of the mythological undead—they’re never going to be able to see each other again. There’s no guarantee that Maryam is even still alive. Why tantalize him with the possibility of reunion that will never materialize?

What is dead ought to stay dead. Some things, once lost, shouldn’t be given back.

They watch troll _Twilight_ together. When the captain finishes spending time with her mother, she and Vantas part by staying on opposite sides of the room. Vantas’ glower is about as intimidating as a pile of pancakes. He raises his fingers and waves them, in millimeter increments. Rose raises her chin, and nods. Her mother and the captain kiss so hard that Rose certain someone must be injured.

“Did you like your present?” her mother says.

“He was loud,” Rose says. “But otherwise, all right. I would have liked to keep him for a little longer.”

“That’s nice, dear.” Her mother examines the olive in her martini glass with a puzzled sort of expression. She looks at the bits of popcorn strewn across the sofa, and a light appears in her eye—the twisted pleasure, Rose supposes, of cleaning. She can practically see her mother’s mind going through her catalogue of vacuums. ‘Shall I use the gold-plated one, or the bronze-plated one, or would it be better to forgo the vacuum and use something like the useless feather duster made from the soft down of a kiwi?’ Something like that. “Well, darling, I see you’ve found my secret labs. I thought I’d be discreet about it until I could bring your little troll friend to you. You two seem to be waxing pale for one another, don’t you think?”

“He already has a moirail,” Rose says. “Also, it is a therapist-patient relationship.”

“Red, then?”

“Like the finest of wines,” Rose says. “Might I inquire as to why you felt the need to construct a hidden laboratory beneath our humble abode?”

“Well, love, all you have to know on the matter is that once xenobiology and cloning was illegal; I would conduct experiments underground with my troll friends, and we would collaborate and exchange data. Once the FDA and CDC and all those other silly little organizations stopped being so squeamish about some good science, I moved my research to the university. That is all there is to it.”

“Is that it? I was hoping you had plans for world domination.”

Her mother lets out a little dry laugh. She takes out a plate of sushi from the fridge, and artfully arranges a plate for Rose. “My sweetest, I had the loveliest plans for a death laser, but my friends told me that I was attracting the attentions of a highblooded troll within the government who was interested in serving my head for lunch, so I moved onto ectobiology instead. Did you find anything of interest there?”

“Why?” Rose says. “Are you worried I’ve found some evidence proving that Alternia and Earth were populated by a common ancestor? The ancient DNA sequence for the First Mother Grub herself? Proof that I wasn’t born, but was instead cloned inside that very lab? Maybe I was brought to this world on the back of a meteor, like the great Buddha himself.” Now that’s interesting. Her mother’s lips purse together. Rose can’t decide if it is because her suggestion was simply ridiculous, or some other, sinister reason. She almost wants it to be the latter.

“It is every scientist’s fondest hope that their research will live on,” her mother says. “I have always wanted a protégé, but even Mr. Strider declined my offer, and I have been left with an ever-changing parade of talented, but impermanent, doctorate and post-doctorate and interns ever since.”

“I’m planning on becoming a transcontinental hobo when I grow up.”

“And I respect your wishes, my precious duckling,” she says, without missing a beat. Her mother is probably now plotting the best train lines for Rose to hitchhike, ordering them from most dangerous to least dangerous, most scenic to least scenic, most mountains to least mountains, and so on and so forth. “You will ride your train of choice across the Pacific and into Hawaii. I will have them name some undiscovered island in your honor. That aside, love, I’ve decided to shut the labs down once and for all. There is no more research to do there, and you have no interests in following in my footsteps, so it would be for the best, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Rose says. “You and I are in absolute concordance yet again, mother.” Is this a challenge? Is there something in there that her mother wants her to find? Does it even matter? Rose has no idea. Her mother pats her head with ironic fondness, and heads back to her office, presumably to get drunk and plot her next scientific monstrosity. Rose stays downstairs, eating sushi with her knitting needles, and thinks about Trollywood, how seven trolls out of ten will not live to see their twentieth birthday, and wizard statues. She tries to lick her own elbow and, despite considerable effort, does not succeed.


	5. Interlude. Speaker: Be the rainbow drinker.

Yes, ladies and lords of the Circle. It has been some time since I’ve last appeared before you. I’ve thought of many new tales for my next audience with The Ones Who Never Stop Mumbling. It’s disappointing to hear you want a tired rehash of the same old world with the same cast of characters. Your tastes are very narrow. I fear my talents are wasted on your long-lobed ears. But don’t mistake my completely insincere lack of desire for an expression of boredom. My enthusiasm is pouring out of me, much like how water dribbles out of a leaking faucet and into weeks-old dirty dishes.

If you won’t allow me to tell the tale of some other, better universe, then let’s at least move onto some other character’s story. Not the Seer’s. Her story is so tiresome and dreary, and you already know how it will go—unless, you suppose, the mere act of telling a story will cause the actors to change, shift, and undergo metamorphosis? It’s not as though they can hear us. They are not electrons shot down a barrel and through twin slits to exhibit some quantum quandary. They are characters skittering about the trees and wilds of upstate New York, where newlyweds have sex on tourist picnic benches for sport. They are living, breathing people down there, and with a shrug of my shoulders, I can take a paradox image of them with my mind and make them dance for you.

So, then, let us turn to the bright one. Or the _BR I GH T O NE_ , as you might put it. How did the previous Speaker begin these silly romps? Whilom, once upon a time, ‘such, as it was’—why would I know? It’s not as though my title is Lip Reader of the Horrorterrors. I see things, not hear them.

Let us, then, presume that we are someone else in some other universe. Yes, let us, for a moment, be the Bright One. No, I didn’t think you would like that. Yes, she is quite unbearable to look at. All that light and self-assurance. I don’t like her anymore than you do. I can’t say she’s ever actively hated humans, but she has certainly never paid them much mind; she sees those funny, sentient mammalian creatures as her cultural and intellectual inferiors. Blithely inconsiderate of human customs and culture, though she’d like to think herself educated and well-versed. Unconsciously arrogant. Unbearable to speak to. It is like shouting at a wall of green text and imperious “You May Think So But You Would Be Wrong In Assuming So  
Oh Wait  
Maybe I Should Phrase It With The Sarcasm You Need To Process This Statement  
I Cant Believe How Right You Are”s.

But I digress. Why grouse about the Bright One at such length? She is fictional, and we are real. To concern ourselves overmuch with her infuriating personality or her underhandedness, or even her better qualities, such as the one where she spends an inordinate amount of time caring for hopeless cases who should have listened to her friends but instead tripped into the boneless arms of faceless doctors and horrorterrors—what, I wonder, is the point in charting one’s own destiny? I am beginning to realize there are few plans in my life that have gone the way I hoped. Embryos spontaneously abort in my presence. Shit, son, hide your womens, hide your childrens, I do believe that I am _making plans_. I’d never mean to imply that your Grand Toothinesses would have ever allowed such deviant thoughts flit through your head. Your actions are comparable to thousands of paper planes, flung through the air at will, landing in the spots they were fated to land on, regardless of their intended destinies. Allow me to add one more flaming wreck to this little pile of derailed fates.

Now here is the tale of Kanaya Maryam, Impromptutationer of Her Imperial Army. The events are, as follows, a brief summary of her life leading up to her Ascension and-or forcible recruitment into Her Imperial Army, her life and death in the Army and subsequent awakening, with the bulk of this tale concerned by a variety of moral dilemmas brought about her new state of undeath or unlife, whichever you may prefer; these dilemmas I will not elaborate upon, doubtless because I am a person of poor moral constitution and will thus live the rest of my life in squalor and abject misery; and after not addressing these problems, I will finally, as some might say, get on with it and reach the part where the Seer and the Sylph engage in a battle of mutual destruction. As for whether this is a tale of truths or untruths—lordlings and ladies of the court, I am afraid that when one is in the business of telling tales for an extended period of time, one begins to find truths in fiction, and falsehood in life. Yes, that does make it hard to tell fiction from nonfiction. You will have to make do with uncomfortable ambiguity. You are the infinitely powerful, almighty monsters of the darkest, furthest reaches. Why be so bothered by a spot of confusion?

 _G E T ON WI TH IT  
GE T ON WIT H IT SPE A K ER_

Very well. We are making this hapen. Let us begin.


	6. Rose: Kill the rainbow drinker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The warning for violence is for this chapter onward.

\--pesterlog--  
\--tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG]\--

TT: Why did you rhyme ‘managerial’ with ‘dat fine material?’  
TT: As your sister, I believe I’m entitled to say this: this is embarrassing, Strider. Cease and desist.   
TG: what   
TG: shit youre watching one of my vids arent you   
TG: always knew you’d love my super sweet raps if you gave them a try but seriously fuck off   
TT: They’re entertaining. It’s like you’re competing with yourself for new lows in ironic lack of taste. What’s next, Dave? Will you “ironically” partake in blackface? Will you wear a dhoti while rapping,   
TT: Gandhi, Gandhi, you hidden libertarian   
TT: Dharma, dharma, let me consult my karmatic librarian   
TT: Examine here my impressive slant rhyme and assonances and shit  
TT: Vimeo, watch out, y’all gonna be getting me another ten score hits.  
TG: hahahahaha wow   
TG: that sucked  
TT: I think I ought to be commended. Feted and crowned queen of the Holy Rapping Empire.   
TT: Is the sword in the video real?  
TG: yeah theyre real bitches   
TG: cmon rose what kind of rapper do you think i am   
TG: did you think i was one of those dudes who runs around whacking people with billyclubs  
TG: swords are where its at man  
TT: Where can I get one?   
TG: whoa   
TG: what  
TG: looking to join us in the strider school of kenjutsu   
TG: warning you now its harder than it looks  
TG: ultimate technique   
TG: detaching our legs at the hip and swinging them around   
TG: wham bam thank you damn death by blood loss  
TT: I thought you were going to make a detachable penis joke.   
TG: please  
TG: i have class   
TT: I don’t doubt it.   
TT: Do you think you can mail one to me?  
TT: A sword, I mean.  
TG: wait what  
TT: What?   
TG: first of all i know you and your mom tend to get a little tense   
TG: but murder isnt the solution okay  
TG: how are you going to pick up the sword from the mailbox  
TG: i mean seriously look outside the window   
TG: see that white stuff falling outside   
TG: its not jizz  
TG: its weather  
TT: …   
TG: when was the last time you went outside i bet the only thing youve done all day is loaf around melting into your couch and watching low budget german films starring crossdressing turkish chicks and their blonde squeezes   
TG: meanwhile, spoodge  
TT: Maybe it’s because I don’t feel like submitting myself to the meteorological bukkake.   
TT: Were I to venture into the frigid depths of the near-Canadian wilderness, I would be dealt 9999 points of damage from an Ice Amp’d Mabufudyne.   
TT: Also, Fremde Haut’s protagonist is Iranian, not Turkish.   
TT: Quite astute of you to pick up on the cross-dressing element, though.  
TG: wait seriously   
TG: hahahaha i know your tastes too well   
TG: but do you really want me to mail you a sword  
TG: im willing but damn lalonde youre reaching new heights of unironic weird  
TT: Am I?   
TT: Does your accusation hold any water when your refrigerator is full of swords and throwing stars? I don’t think you’ve ever had a home-cooked meal in your life.  
TT: I suspect your scrawniness is directly related to your diet of razorblades and uncooked boxed pasta.  
TG: that shit makes me strong  
TG: also fuck you and your licentious tongue   
TT: Sorry. I only meant to point out that if “weird” could be measured with a thermometer, we would turn upstate New York and Houston into barren, sandy wastelands.   
TG: houston already sucks balls not much more you can do there but yeah   
TT: So while we’re sitting at our laptops, considering how weird we are, I’ll just come out and say it.  
TT: Strider, I’m going to become a vampire slayer.   
TG: ……..  
TG: hahahahahahahahaha  
TG: hahahahahahahaha  
TT: Hold on for a second.  
TT: I think something just exploded outside.   
TG: okay rose if you say so

 

*

 

It seems to be a law of upstate New York: whenever a meteor crashes into a mountain, a freak biological accident will occur. This time there are glowing cows and a few miniature ponies. But mostly cows.

In part because the tree bleeders wiped out the maple syrup and tourist industry, the dairy farmers roll out the news slowly. Rose is certain that the 2012 election will have the most surreal debates in the history of Lawrence county: what did _you_ do the year alien bugs sucked our maple industry dry and made our dairy industry suspect, Senator Ritchie? Well? A thousand moos went unanswered that night—and where, good sir, were you? Were you in Albany, resting your laurels in the Amtrak station or at city hall, or were you here with us, as we moved our industry from dairy to leather? Yes, I thought so! Well enjoy your irradiated steak, you whiskered bum!

Gyra, gyra, gyra. She cracks herself up. When did she start laughing like that? Never mind. Surely it doesn’t matter.

Her mother’s lab has acquired a number of glowing cows, since their equipment is amongst the most advanced in New York state. It keeps her busy. Between school, the violin, and her usual activities and her mother’s work, Rose doesn’t see much of her mother at all. If the fridge is stocked with more beef than usual, well, Rose can always claim that she has made the decision to become a vegetarian and her mother forcing her to eat steak is a violation of human rights, or at least Rose’s own rights for basic moral agency. Rose isn’t a vegetarian, though. She considers becoming one, just to make a statement.

 

*

 

Rose doesn’t think much of the cows until the local newspaper begins to report that the cows are getting bitey and wasting away, and farmers are putting them down in fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Rose nearly gives her whiplash in revising her initial assessment of the cows. It’s obvious what is going on: Maryam has been feeding on livestock. It’s not as though upstate New York has a shortage of cows or ponies, after all. And as for the glowing—god knows, maybe the meteor did something. Yes. Yes, that’s what happened—she thinks this, even as she’s aware that her logic is teetering like a house battered by a hurricane, because there could be so many reasons why the cows of New York have lit up—a sign of the end of times, a belated Christmas prank, maybe someone out there just really, really likes cows. Thinking to herself, ‘Vampires!’ when the answer could be so many more logical things—Rose knows she is jumping to conclusions, even if her conclusion is the best of all of them. It’s just that—

It’s just that not testing it would be poor science.

Rose rubs at her cuticles, debates the ways she might be wrong or might be right—in the meantime, she’s practically worn the polish right off her nails, and has to spend an hour repainting them just right. The easiest way to confirm her hypothesis would be to go to her mother’s lab, but her mother’s commissioned portraits of Rose and had them hung in the halls, so walking down the labs is like going through a funhouse. The portraits are photorealistic and capture every blemish on her skin, every flyaway hair, and even the little bruise on her hand she got in gym class. Rose isn’t going through that place unless someone ties the back of her shirt to a car and drags her dead body there.

She settles for the next best thing: breaking into her mother’s computer. Her mother syncs her work laptop and the main desktop, and of course, her mother uses the same password for both the laboratory (locked, now, both from the front and from the trapdoor—Rose has tried) computer and, evidently, every other electronic device she owns. Rose has resisted taking the obvious bait for years, but now she needs to know.

She doesn’t feel at all guilty, because it’s bait and if her mother isn’t clever enough to set a trap—that’s her fault, not Rose’s.

The hard data makes little sense to her, so she browses around until she reaches the notes section.

we receidved some cowss   
**received   
there gloqing p cool 

so these notes r just for myselff   
god m so tired   
as suppelments for teh notes my other notes 

first impressiom their rly bright   
were doing some stuff to them rn   
nothing fancy wer eputting them in xrays   
and cat scans  
and mris   
radioactive iodine   
captn wants pitchersf uck him this shit is classified bicthes

i wonder if rose wwill awnt one for a pet gunna have to ask her maybe for her good scores on the sats 

Is everything a joke to her mother? Is that chatspeak? What is wrong with the world?

they bite a llot   
dont knw why but were having every1

everyone 

wear gloves and proteckton  
**protection  
in my RL notebook im saying its probbly bc of disease  
but like what kind of diseases would make them bitey???  
i think theyre zombies butt lol u never no  
**but  
***know  
****fuck it  
zombie invasion   
u herd it here first  
**heard  
no wait thats a p amazing  
herd it here  
first

… Enough of this. Who even believes in zombies these days?

Now what she needs are distribution maps. The local newspaper has an incomplete map, and Rose suspects the reporter from _The New York Times_ won’t be done collecting information for some time. She does find a list of farms where her mother’s received the glowing cows. Rose memorizes the names of the farms, and then closes all the windows. She’s done here. She’s tempted to leave a message on the computer. Something like a spellchecked version of her mother’s notes, or a condescending text file left surreptitiously in some deeply buried folder. In the end, she doesn’t. Why bother when she’s already won so completely, or when she’s not even sure if winning was the point of this little venture?

One day, she knows—she knows this not in the ironic way people realize things in movies, when characters are fuddling along to their inevitable and grisly fates, but in the prophetic way people understand things before they happen, a way that works on intuition and not at all on reason—she will think of what a fool she was, constantly playing games when she should have been _(PRO MIS E)_ doing other things. Rose shuts the computer down and returns to her laptop.

The farms form a rough line heading southeast. Rose finds the names of farms along that line, and charts. It’s a more-or-less straight line, she notes, along NY 458. She thinks Maryam will be heading out of town—so, southeast. Which makes her most likely location right now to be on one of three farms along the same highway.

It’s nearly sunset. Her mother won’t be back for dinner tonight—and it’s not as though her mother has ever kept track of her whereabouts. Rose fetches her sword from her room, and departs.

 

*

 

The drive from her house to the first farm on her list isn’t a long one. She takes the time to investigate the other dairy farms, too: whether there are any common features of the land, if it’s busy out, maybe quickly check on Woebegone Conditions of Repeated Familial Interactions, since he lives in a nearby stable. It’s a quick ten minute detour. He’s doing quite fine. She gives him an apple and moves on.

She drives past each of the three farms. She’s looking for a place with cows, but Maryam will want a place with cover—the glowing thing is, undoubtedly, tricky to work around. Somewhere with woods and trees, for moving under cover. There are two farms that fit this criteria, the Shady Yew Dairy Farm, which has a name that has always reminded Rose of a sinister nursing home or the name of an obscure rapper, and the smaller, more wooded Mishpokhe Dairy. Rose chooses Mishpokhe. It’s farther from her house, for one. And second, Shady Yew is too large and well-staffed to provide a good hiding spot for long. And third, Mishpokhe has a number of rundown barns on the property.

She parks on a side street, wraps her scarf around her neck, and readies the sword. It is, as Dave puts it, shitty. And Rose has about as much experience swinging a sword as she does shooting a gun. But it only takes one good flail, and Maryam already underestimates her. It’ll be for Maryam’s own good, anyhow. Maryam certainly didn’t deserve to die and win the consolation prize in the undead lottery, but she does deserve to be put to rest. It’s not hate that motivates her, but pity. The human kind of pity. The kind of very nonsexual pity that leads humans to put down their beloved dogs, or stuff their dead cats and enshrine them in their backyard.

It’s cold and the snow comes up to her knees. There are other footprints in the snow, more than Rose expected. By the time Rose pushes her way to the first rundown barn, her socks are wet and the wind has settled somewhere between her ribs and will not be dislodged. The roof has holes, but the ground, covered with rotting hay, is at least dry. She shakes the snow out of her boots, looks. A suspicious pile of leaves, piled up in a corner. Rose thinks she sees Alternian script scratched into the wall, but when she looks closer, they’re just scribbles. Rose blows hot air on her hands, and takes off for the second farmhouse. Her fingers are freezing, and the cold is working its way into her elbows and shoulders. But as she arrives in the next barn and surveys how completely and bleakly empty it is, the main thing she thinks is: she is going to end up with frostbite and hypothermia, and people will ask her what happened to the tips of her fingers, and all she’ll have to say for herself is, “I was young and not as informed of the dangers of the wild north as I would have liked to be.”

Rose sits on a box, and rubs her fingers together until they’re warm again. Maryam has to be here. Why would she be anywhere else? She’ll go as far as the third farmhouse, and then track footprints into the woods for a while, and then turn around, go home, and go through her mother’s computer for more data. She’s not wrong. Why does she even think she could be?

The second farmhouse is even more decrepit and worn out than the first. The beams are falling in. One wall has a hole punched through it. Rose looks for clues anyway. No leaf piles. No scratches on the wall—no, there are scratches on the wall. “George and Harold BFFs.” “Amity + Henry.” “Gregorina and Sestina <3<3<3” Maybe the next people to put their names on the wall will be Oregon and Dysentery. True love forever, there. Without a doubt. Rose’s knuckles crack like wood when she flexes her fingers, and her jaw’s stiff and she’s nearly rolled her ankle in twice, and she’s barely started on her little hunt.

The third farm has a bolt of cloth in a corner, along with enormous piles of leaves, far away from a crack in the wall. Rose picks up the cloth and gives it a long sniff. It smells like cat urine, mice feces, and, maybe, a little like an actual person. Is she reaching? She’s probably reaching. She also doesn’t give a shit. Rose circles the barn house, and sees three distinct trails: one heading into the woods, one to the stalls where the cows are kept, and one leading back to the house.

Maryam is in these woods. Rose is certain of it. Rose is armed with knowledge, a sword, and at the very least, the ability to run back to the barn if Maryam gives her a good wound—or, far more likely, if she hurts herself on Dave Strider’s shitty double-edged weapon. Rose feels as though, maybe, she should have left a note for her mother after all, something more along the lines of, _sorry, my lovely mother, I have gone to risk life and limb over a vampire_ instead of, _do you ever change your passwords? That’s dangerous, Mom._

The forest is cold and dark. The barn has long vanished behind the trees when she realizes that the footprints she is following have suddenly multiplied. There are far more footprints than there should be. She has no idea how many people there are, but if she were to make a rough guess, she’d say somewhere between five and ten. Rose looks back at the path she’s taken from Mishpokhe, and then at the footprints ahead. They’re fresh. Not as old as the one Rose followed into the trees. Hours new? Days? This whole tracking thing isn’t nearly as easy as she thought it’d be.

Whatever. All she has to do is find the trail that leads to Maryam. But she soon finds that this seems to be the trail everyone else has followed, too. Rose wiggles her toes in her boots. Maryam is tall, in a way that all trolls are tall. Six and a half feet at least, surely. More, taking the horns into account. Her feet must be correspondingly large. She’ll pick the largest footprints and follow those.

She’s thirty minutes into the woods when she looks up and realizes she’s nearly in the same spot as before, and she has been walking in literal circles. It is nearly nine o’clock. She’s cold, though well-fed, and she’s been doing this since sundown. The cold has given her a headache. She is a girl with a sword and a flashlight and her reasons for doing this are so insubstantial that she can see the case report being published in a psychology journal right now. Girl found lost in woods armed with sword, refuses to use the flashlight, talks a good deal about how this is not a mother-daughter bonding experience, claims to be hunting vampires. Note how she has set up hidden cameras in the mausoleum of her cat and has a demonstrable obsession with vampires. Diagnose her, please.

She stops pushing through the snow. Her knees are freezing and she’s no longer sure if she has wrists, never mind fingers or hands. This is stupid. _She_ is stupid.

She clicks on the flashlight, and in an instant, her night vision washes out. A literal ‘seeing of the light,’ so to speak. Her lips curl. Yes, she sees how it is. She is some girl out in the dark woods who wants to be more than she is. She might have always known that wizards are fiction, but it doesn’t mean she’s never stopped believing in magic. And now—well, now it is time to grow up and move back into a world of reason and common sense. Even if there are troll psychic echoes wandering the world, even if there are vampires—so what? Destiny is for people with far grander lives than hers. Hasn’t _A Game of Thrones_ taught her that even fantasy, at its most real, comes down to the same psychological tugs and jerks as any other genre? Hasn’t she learned anything from the great novels of the past? So many things boil down to who wants to be in whose bed, or who wants whose money, or whose latest rash decision will make the whole thing go pear-shaped.

So what. Destiny, bitterness, common sense—Rose looks down at her flashlight. The sensible thing would be to turn around and go back to her car. Yes, that would be the sensible thing. And Rose is a sensible girl—or at least, she has built her life around being the one who knows things and understands things faster and better than other people. And that’s not the same thing, see. Because sensible means things like _good girl_ and _my precious daughter_ and gold stars. And what she is doing, and the things she wants to do, and the reasons why she does them won’t get her into a college. Nor will it deserve any gold stars. She clicks the flashlight off.

She knows there is a rainbow drinker in these woods. “Move back into a world of reason”—she has reasons. Not good ones, but they’re reasons. Air may be insubstantial, but it has weight. She isn’t going to just be some girl romping around the snow pretending to be a vampire slayer. She is going to make the universe twist itself into a pretzel and cry for its mother, and then she is going to take Maryam’s head and slice it off her neck and _then_ she will complete her little hero’s journey and go back to a life of high school and college and two point one children with a house on the top of the mountain.

But first—and the cold air snakes into the gap between her gloves and her sleeves and the moon’s crescent grin illuminates the tops of the trees and nothing else and the stars are washed black by the light of distant, far-off cities—comes finding the rainbow drinker. She waits for her night vision to adjust, and keeps plunging through the snow.

 

*

 

It’s another half an hour until she reaches the end of the trail. It leads to a small, but bright, hole in the ground. Leaves cover the entrance, but do nothing to hide the glow. Rose can’t feel anything: not her face, not her legs, not her arms. There’s a dead bear, slung up in the branches. The sword is heavy in her hands when she drags it out of its sheath.

She’s so _tired_. She wants to lie down in the hole with Maryam and fall asleep and resume the vampire hunt some other time. But she’s come all this way, and who will she be if she can’t kill a sleeping vampire? Forget honor. She isn’t some feudal lord. Chivalry died long before the reign of Edward III. She hasn’t come all this way just to fail.

Rose takes two steadying breaths. She bends down on one knee and clears away some of the leaves. Maryam, sleeping there, looks even younger than she had on the night when she appeared in Rose’s basement. Not as well-fed. Probably because of the season. Rose wonders: where has she been, what has she been doing—how did she die, is she looking for someone out here? And then she presses the tip of the blade into Maryam’s neck. Her hands don’t shake. Rose draws a grim validation from the steadiness. But it’s also strangely disappointing.

Maryam’s eyes, green on yellow, slide open.

“Hello,” Rose says. “I’m not sure if you remember me or not.”

“What,” Maryam says, and her face looks more puzzled than alarmed. Damn her. Rose is a credible threat. She is holding a knife to Maryam’s neck, surely that warrants some surprise. “What are you doing?”

“Why, Maryam,” she says. “You disappoint me. Surely this transcends cultural boundaries.”

Limbs move beneath the leaves. Rose pushes the tip further—not that it matters. Maryam’s hand moves, a blur of glowing frost. She slaps the sword— _slaps_ —out of the way, and the blade scatters, like a leaf tossed to the wind, to the frozen ground. Rose springs away, makes an ungainly stumble to the sword. Picks it up. They’re both on their feet now. Rose’s cheeks smart hot with anger. Maryam circles around Rose; a solitary wolf on the hunt. Rose keeps her quarry in sight, but otherwise knows it’s best to stay in place. She doesn’t know what weaknesses she might reveal on the move.

“You are with the human headhunters,” Maryam says. “I should have expected you would join them.”

“I’ve come here alone, actually,” Rose says. “By means of blindly stumbling through the snowy, mountainous land that is New York. I was looking for you.”

“Oh my.”

“What—no, that’s not what I meant.”

“No,” Maryam says, and her smile is an amused one. “But it’s funny to imagine that it is, because otherwise it means you have really come here to kill me with your nonexistent experience.”

“I thought you’d be thrilled,” Rose says, and now her arms are getting tired, damn. “You could claim self-defense.”

“You’re too pathetic to kill,” she says.

“Oh _my_.”

Maryam, unexpectedly, blushes, though the rest of her face goes cross. “Your false scandalized exclamation does nothing to hide that you know I did not mean it like that. You need to learn how to space your jokes better, human.”

“Did you really not mean it like that?” Rose says. “It’s been a long time. You’ve been living off of cows, small ponies, and maybe drunk humans. I suspect I’m the first decent conversation you’ve had in weeks.”

“You are flattering yourself if you want to call this a conversation. Never mind—” and Maryam’s eyes spark with mocking, unheard laughter. “—a _good_ one.”

Rose lines the tip of her sword with Maryam’s mouth, then lowers it down to her throat, between her breasts. Oh, how she’d like to bury the blade into this girl’s throat. How she’d like to silence that mocking mouth. To make it all just and fair and right. “No,” she says. “I don’t think I am.”

She _knows_ Maryam is going to leap towards her. It just happens faster than she can react to. It’s a literal leap, a sudden compression and then release, a flight through air with teeth bared and hand extended. She has enough time to adjust the sword, but not enough to plan. For one horrible moment, she thinks she’s blown it, and the panic tilts the blade a little bit up. There’s resistance, solid and steady—a shock crumpling Maryam’s face—then it gives way, faster and faster, until it punches out the other end.

The body travels further than Rose expects, even after Rose lets go of the hilt as though it’s come alive and bitten her. It hits the ground and skids. The blade shines jade green in the dark. Rose forgets to breathe, then remembers, and the cold air freezes her sinuses, turns her whole head into an empty cave with icicles heavy on the brain—then Maryam shifts. She’s trying to turn over.

Rose walks. Her feet sink deep into the snow, and the chill makes each step audible. She rolls Maryam over to the side and pulls the blade out—Maryam hisses, in pain or annoyance. She falls, spread eagle, into the snow. And it’s the same thing again, with Rose’s sword at Maryam’s throat. But different.

So this is it? This is it. She’s done it. She has won this little game. A long while passes. Rose, painfully, says, “You’re supposed to beg for mercy.”

“Maybe I’ve been hoping it would turn out this way,” Maryam says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve left Alternia, and this life is not what I thought it’d be—”

“Shut up,” Rose breathes, and she does. How dare she. How dare she ask for death. Rose is the one who knows what she is doing. She is the one pulling the strings. She has all the cards on all of the strings in all of the fiery metaphors. She has such a headache right now and she’s so tired, she doesn’t want to do this anymore—she doesn’t want to do much of anything anymore. “Give me one reason why I should—you don’t even know what you’ve—” She can’t continue. This isn’t what she’s supposed to say. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. She’s supposed to decapitate Maryam and go back home with—a trophy? Or just the satisfaction of a job done.

She could do it. Maryam would let her. And then what—then there will be this darkness, this cold, this spot of green rising in the snow. She’ll be Rose Lalonde, vampire slayer, but it depends, doesn’t it, on if that is what she wants to be, if that’s who she wants to be. It makes sense to kill the BRI GHT ON E… the bright one, or does it—she’s the kind of girl who shows mercy to the defeated, but this depends on if she is a victor, if this was ever a game, on so many things.

She understands jackshit. Rose raises the sword a few inches—watches, with fascination, as Maryam flinches, and squeezes her eyes shut in anticipation of pain. Her hands betray her; the sword wobbles, all of it, from pommel to tip. Rose raises it higher, and thrusts it down into the earth. There’s a whistling sound and then a hollow ringing, and the blade snaps in two. Rose stares at the useless hilt and sharp-edged metal in her hand; and says, “I was originally about to make a speech worthy of Mark Antony about how I had you at my mercy and your life was in my palms, but the means by which I hoped to make my point is broken.” Maryam looks ready to make a snarky remark. Before she can, Rose says, “I have just proven my martial superiority over you.”

“Not really,” she says. “You got lucky.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, there’s a very fetching hole through your abdomen, and none through mine,” Rose says. “You’re also the one who jumped headfirst at an armed opponent. Reckless, even if you are trying to make a point to an admitted amateur. I’m disappointed.” Maryam snorts in a way that makes it clear that Rose was never an opponent. Rose, gallantly, ignores it. She takes a breath. “As you previously stated, your current life is a parade of wretched events. I have no permanent cure either for your condition or for your exile, but I do think I can find a way to make your life more bearable. My mother will surely have no problem with allowing an exotic troll specimen to occupy her lab for a brief period of time.” Her mother will arrange for a wedding. Never mind that. They can deal with it when it comes.

Maryam looks up at Rose. It’s a stare full of suspicion and disinclination to believe. Rose feels as though she’s tied a cardigan around her neck and tried flying about her backyard to be Batman or Wonder Woman, only to find that cardigans make poor capes. The slithering sensation of imagination dropping from her shoulders to the ground is the same as the one she feels now.

“What do you want from me?” Maryam says.

“I’ve just told you,” Rose says. “There is no point in continuing our fight. I have won and you have lost. I am taking you back to my home as a present for my dear mother.”

“No,” Maryam says. “I mean that your behavior has been strange and erratic. First you assault me and now you pity me and now you want to go pale. Or since you are a human, it is possible you want none of these at all. I don’t have the patience to suffer your human one-dimensional emotional lives right now. Is this a human friendship ritual?”

Friends? Rose thinks: she doesn’t want to be Maryam’s _friend_. She doesn’t even know if they can be friends. They’ve had an inauspicious beginning, and an even more inauspicious reintroduction. Friendship—Rose doesn’t even know if she’s good at it.

Maryam’s lips push sideways, then up; surprisingly earnest, and yet, all the while, sly. She is thinking of something that Rose doesn’t know of yet. It sends a disconcerting thrill through her stomach that might be misinterpreted for pain.

“Okay,” Maryam says. “We can be not friends.”

She extends her hand. Rose stares dumbly at it, and then realizes she is supposed to take it. She tosses aside Dave’s broken sword, and helps Maryam up. And so this marks the start of something. Rose just isn’t sure what.


	7. Rose: Dream

_"Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”_  
-Attributed to obscure Roman poet, Tom Petty.

They wait for Maryam’s wound to heal. Maryam huddles back into her little hole in the ground, though she leaves her head out. Black hair and orange horns, atop a pile of white on white. Rose gathers some leaves and sticks. She’s read about people starting fires like this before. Two sticks, dead leaves, a lot of friction—what does it matter if she can’t actually get a spark going?

“What are you doing?” Maryam says.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“It would be if you didn’t look so stupid. Are you cold?”

“No. I just want to commit some arson.”

“I would invite you in here,” Maryam says, “but that would violate the terms of our not friendship.” A little moment passes. Maryam shucks off her army coat. It’s heavy and bloodstained and has dirt all over it. Rose drapes it over her shoulders. She tucks her knees into her chest, and tries not to look as cold as she feels. It’s just past ten o’clock. Her mother must be home by now—Rose realizes, a second late, that her phone is still in her car. It’s not like her mother will even realize she’s missing. Whatever. Rose slides her fingers behind her knees. Doesn’t matter now.

“How is it doing?” Rose says.

“It’s not done yet, thank you,” Maryam says primly. “I estimate that it will be repaired in another hour’s time. That is sixty of your human minutes.”

“Hours are the same for everyone, Maryam.” Rose is shivering so hard that she’s not sure if she’ll ever be able to stop. She clenches her jaw tight. The tremors move to her shoulders. The world vibrates.

“I was assuming you didn’t know what they were.”

“You’re delightful,” Rose mutters. Maryam’s eyes drift shut. Rose pushes her awake with her foot. She grunts, and opens one eye. “Have the blustery winds stolen away your breath?”

“I am undead,” Maryam says. “I have no reason to breathe. What do you want, human?”

“Call me Lalonde.”

“Lalonde human,” she says, and Rose would slap her forehead with her palm if it didn’t mean removing her fingers from her knees. “We have just embarked on our journey in being not friends, so if you do not mind, as my not friend, allow me to rest. You must be tired, too. We should both take advantage of this opportunity to recover.”

It sounds like the smart thing to do. “Yes, but if I succumb to slumber, I’ll die.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Quite. Since this is a burgeoning not friendship—” She doesn’t understand this not friend thing. Hatefriend, at least, is based off of some real emotion, but a not friend? What the fuck is that even supposed to be? “—I must ask that we solidify our bond by partaking in an exchange of information.”

It’s not an easy conversation. They’re speaking at a three-to-one sentence-to-meaning ratio, at least, and Maryam is especially bad, maybe because her only other conversational partners have been cows and horses and a stray squirrel or two. The gist of it seems to come down to this:

Immediately After Completing My Training I Was Assigned To An Eastern Dragonriding Unit   
Mostly Because Those Units Always Have Problems With Their Riders Getting Crushed By Their Steeds  
And Also Extreme Burns Which Sometimes Get Infected Due To Poor Treatment Which Can Require Amputation   
Sometimes These Units Exist Just For Highbloods To Get Imposing Battle Scars  
In Retrospect It Was Inevitable That Itd Turn Out Badly  
I Mean No Matter How You Try To Get Around It Terezi Is Blind As The Chalk She Eats   
Honestly Who Was It That Let Her Ride A Dragon Around   
Especially A Dragon That Breathes Fire And Spits Acid  
She Cant See Why Would They Do That It Is The Height Of

You’re rambling, Maryam.

Right  
Sorry  
But We Went East To Expand The Empire When We Encountered Unexpected Resistance   
Certain Dissenters From A Recently-Defeated City-State Ambushed Us   
My Company Was Decimated   
I Acquired A Head Injury And I Know What you Are Thinking Lalonde Human But I Have Fully Recovered Your Snarkitude Is Not Appreciated Right Now So Please Bite A Considerable Chunk Of Your Tongue Off  
I Survived Along With Several Of My Friends   
We Were Lucky I Guess  
After Taking Some Time Off To Recover I Was Reassigned To A Sliceterminator Unit   
As An Impromputationer My Presence Was Invaluable Since Sliceterminators Have A High Rate Of Friendly Fire Especially Since Two Of The Unit Leaders Were Locked Into An Unhealthy Kismesissitude   
So My Services Were Requested Especially Frequently   
Just One Of Many Signs That Things Were Going To Be   
Messy  
Of Course Since I Was New I Didnt Realize How Unhealthy It Was Until Our Units Were Three Hours Away From Our Main Company   
The Leaders Ordered Us To Fight   
And Like Idiots We Successfully Exterminated Ourselves   
It Was A Very Successful Mission I Guess If You Want To Define Our Objective As Kill Everything Within A Two Hundred Meter Radius  
I Was The Only Survivor   
For The First Few Months I Tried Contacting Home But Couldnt   
After A While It Became Apparent That We Had Been Left For Dead And I Was To Recreate The Hidden Kingdom Series Where The Disinherited Tyrian Blood Escapes Near Death And Becomes A Shadow Dropper  
She Lives Out In The Wilderness And Preys On The Livestock And Then Woos The Blood Gusher Of A Green Blood  
And Then They Both Die Tragically When An Asteroid Collides With Their—

“What?” Rose says.

“It is a beautiful story,” Maryam sniffs. “And the ending is aesthetically pleasing as it is full of meaning.”

“I’m certain,” Rose says. “I know all of the high tragedies and some of the more ambitious comedies inevitably end with an asteroid destroying the whole city-state. While I know they represent the annihilation of a corrupt state to make way for the Empire, they’ve always seemed a touch _deus ex asteroida_.”

“Mother Grubs can only be hatched in these asteroids. And from the ruins of those city states will come a new brooding cavern. As a jade blood, it would have been my duty to seek out one of those asteroids and hatch my lusus’ matriorb there.” Maryam slides into the hole a little deeper. The wind picks up again. Rose pulls Maryam’s coat around her more tightly. “Of course, I assumed my blood caste and its offices would allow me some measure of deferment from the Empire’s conscription. Obviously it did not.”

“That must be rough.”

“It is,” Maryam says, with a long-suffering expression that marks her as one of _those_ people who are born with a purpose and believe they are bound to carry this purpose to the final end without once questioning why they have been given that particular job and what they can do to get out of it, “the duty of a citizen.”

Rose checks her watch. Half an hour left.

“From what I remember of your hive, you are of a high caste yourself,” Maryam says. “A ‘blue blood,’ so to speak. You say your lusus is some kind of scientist.”

“In America, they’d just call me a WASP, actually.” Maryam rolls her eyes. She’s probably thought of some nasty, degrading pun about stingers and thorns—or maybe Rose has just imagined Maryam thinking this. Either way, it makes something hot spill across her shoulders. “What is your question, Maryam? Do you mean to ask if I have any breeding duties in my future?”

“It _is_ the duty of everyone to contribute to their race—”

“I’ve never been so disenchanted by a statement before in my life.”

“—But I can tell you only mean what you say with a typical human insincerity that will make my thinkpan itch.”

“I’m a human,” Rose says. “There aren’t any blood castes, Maryam. And we humans do not hold to such prescriptivist notions of class and occupation.” She knows she’s wrong. That’s not the point. “I’ll probably become a scholar or a university professor. I may look into becoming an author of some sorts. I don’t know.” Maryam gives her a pitying look. Rose curls her fingers into her thighs. “It’s a normal thing to be uncertain. Forgive me for being a poor example of determinism and fatality. Were it my destiny to be enlisted into the army and then shot and killed before my twentieth birthday, I’m sure I, too, would think of millions of potential things I could do.”

“You see,” Maryam says, “that’s the funny thing. There was a point in my life when I thought things could have turned out differently. I used to have dreams about a city of gold and a man without a face. I dreamed of those strange amphibious frogs. I dreamed our universe was not this amorpheous blob of space but had a form and a shape—but those dreams have been replaced by a meddling blueblood who gives me nonsensical messages, and a waking life that consists of sleeping in leaf piles in the cold and having no one but some snooty pink skinned human for conversation.” Maryam turns away. “You’re lucky. You still have choices.”

 

*

 

They walk back. Maryam insists on keeping a different path than the one Rose came. She says something about hunters, but will not specify. When Rose pushes a little harder, she admits that she’s been living off of cows, and the winter has made her, in short, a bit desperate, and she might have fed more frequently from the livestock than she would have liked. The week before, she found a drunk farmhand and took a sip; she was caught by a farmer and escaped into the woods. She’s been out here ever since.

Since they’re taking a roundabout way back, it takes them two hours to find Rose’s car. By that time, Rose has, at best, a pinkie’s grip on consciousness. She’s stopped caring about Maryam fussing about leaving footprints behind or whether or not their paths are going to cross with anyone’s or anything’s, and outright leans on Maryam for support. She drops her keys four times before she manages to open the door. She and Maryam nearly collapse into the car. Rose starts the engine and turns on the heat.

They sit there for a while, waiting for her car’s heating system to kick in. The warmth only serves to exhaust Rose further. Maryam, too, looks tired. She has to slouch to fit in the car and tilt her head forward to keep her horns from puncturing the ceiling; but even so, the tilt of her head suggests sleepiness and not consideration for potential repair bills.

“How long is it to your hive?” Maryam says.

“A bit under forty minutes,” Rose says. She pushes her fingers into her nose, and then says, “I’m afraid that I’m quite exhausted and am at risk of driving my car off the mountain if I drive.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Maryam doesn’t seem like a shining specimen of awakeness right now, either, though she certainly is… B RI G HT. So to speak. “It would be best if we were to sleep for a while.”

“Let me drive to somewhere quieter, then.”

She ends up pulling into the back of a strip mall. Four of the seven stores are boarded shut, and one of the stores still in business is technically just an ATM. Hardly anyone drives by. They’ll be safe for a few hours. She sets the alarm on her phone for an hour from now. That, she figures, ought to be good enough. Maryam is yawning, stretching her legs as far as she can manage. The glow from her face is soft, diffuse. It is heartachingly beautiful. Christ, she’s tired.

“You might be more comfortable in the back,” Rose says. “Where you can lie down.”

“Hrmm,” she says. “Are you sure?”

“You’re right,” Rose says. “You’ll get dirt all over the seat.”

“I’m getting dirt all over this seat, too,” she points out. She thumps her back against the seat a few times. “Where is the seat reclining mechanism?”

“There’s a lever on the side. Press down on that and lean back.”

“I’m pressing, but nothing is happening.”

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“I fail to see how.”

“If your goal is to make the back of your chair dip to a more obtuse angle and your chair remains as erect as it ever has, then that should serve as proof as enough for the ineffectiveness of your floundering.” Maryam gives Rose an annoyed, yellow look. Rose sucks in air through her teeth. “Forget it, I’ll do it for you.”

She opens the car door, goes around, opens Maryam’s door. Maryam shifts. “See. I have my hand on this lever.”

“That’s the wrong lever,” Rose says. Maryam is brighter up close than she would have expected. She leans in. Their hands brush; Rose ignores the purely incidental contact, suppresses any thought that it might not be an accident but a movement with purpose—anyhow, she depresses the lever. Maryam falls back. Her hand flails out and grabs Rose’s shoulder. It’s an uncomfortable strain, Maryam pulling her one way, most of her body out of the car. Her options are to advance or abscond. And Rose doesn’t retreat. She doesn’t believe in retreating. Not right now, at least.

She climbs in, and shuts the door behind her. It’s hard finding a spot to place her knees and hands without seeming—overly forward, so to speak. Never mind. She’ll be overly forward if she wants to be. Knees on either side of Maryam’s hips, hands set on either side of Maryam’s head. Maryam’s other hand, the one not on her shoulder, settles on Rose’s wrist, and Rose feels some of the cold in her bones jump out of her. She shivers, and says, “I’ve been wondering what you meant by not friends.”

“I think you understand what I meant,” Maryam says.

“You scheming wench.” She flicks Maryam’s bangs out of her eyes. She’s not a frightening looking creature, when one gets down to it. A predator’s face, yes. A sharpness of her features rare even among trolls. But Rose isn’t scared of her, and it’s probably trick of rainbow drinker hypnosis—or maybe, maybe, this is—not destined or fated, that’d be stupid. Or maybe she just wants to kiss the sinisterly attractive girl she literally found in the woods.

Rose looks down at the body before her, looks until Maryam’s knee raises up, and brushes against the inside of Rose’s thigh. Rose clenches her jaw and grips the leather seat, but otherwise does nothing else. When Maryam hisses, actually hisses, in frustration, Rose grips Maryam’s horns, and kisses her on the mouth.

It’s not a bad kiss, all things considering. She expects Maryam’s mouth to be gunked with tartar or bear fur, but it’s clean, if a bit earthy. Okay. She’s fine with letting it get a little deeper now. Maryam’s hand slides from her wrist, up her arm, and squeezes her other shoulder. Then Maryam pulls Rose down, and Rose doesn’t give a shit about dirt stains or kissing someone she has literally stabbed with a sword a few hours before or any of it. Maryam’s tongue, warm but not as warm as she would have thought it’d be, licks her lower lip, then slips into her mouth, and it’s _good_ , she likes this, she really does.

They’ve just reached the part where she’s trying to take her bra off while unbuttoning Maryam’s pants when Maryam says, “ _Rose_.”

“What?” Rose says. Her fingers fall still. There’s a chill on her back. She looks for her shirt.

“No, please,” Maryam says, and tries to pull her down again. Rose presses the heel of her hand against Maryam’s sternum. Maryam falls back against the car seat, looking on one hand bewildered, and on the other, peeved. “I don’t understand. Isn’t that your name?”

“I told you to call me Lalonde. How do you—no, never mind.” Rose twists her body around and manages to fling one leg back into the driver’s side. God, everything’s weird now. It would’ve been weird before, but now it’s grotesquely comedic.

Maryam props herself up on her elbows. Her expression has smoothed, creased now only at the very corners of her mouth, just a bit around an eyebrow. “I assumed,” she says, “you came to know my name in the same way I know yours.”

“Enlighten me,” Rose says. “No, wait, don’t. You’re a troll psychic.”

“Rose—Lalonde, that’s redundant,” Maryam says. “Everyone knows that all true psychics are trolls. Troll psychic implies there might be human psychics. And no, I have no psychic powers. But I’ve been occasionally granted a precognitive dream and—”

“And my name just happened to fall out of the sky one day?” Rose says. “Dropped down from these dream clouds? I’m flattered, yet a little skeeved.” She breathes, shuts her eyes. For good measure, she buckles herself into the driver’s seat. She’s, suddenly, more exhausted than before. All of those hours of marching through the cold, the exertion of the fight—she doubts she’ll be driving anywhere soon.

“I’ve ruined it, haven’t I,” Maryam says.

“It was a mistake on both of our parts,” Rose says. “Such dreams must be normal for you trolls. One more cultural difference I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get used to.” She turns the heat up, although by now it’s so warm she thinks she’d be better off losing a few layers. She runs her hair through her fingers, not bothering to check a mirror.

“Maybe humans are capable of it.”

“You were the one who said ‘troll psychic’ was redundant. Unless you wish to abandon the ground you previously claimed?”

“There is no winning with you, is there, Lalonde human?” Maryam says, and Rose can hear her teeth clicking against each other in frustration. “For what it’s worth, I derived a good deal of pleasure from our activities. And you’re a very clever girl.”

Mere flattery. Rose lets her own seat dip, and turns over on her side so her back it to the passenger’s side. “Maryam, let’s just say that we were both tired and put this flirtatious misadventure aside so we can sleep.” She resets the alarm on her phone and says, “I’m going to nap for an hour. Good night, Impromputationer Maryam.”

Maryam says nothing back for a long while. Rose shuts her eyes. She can still see the afterimage of Maryam’s face, a faint glow of green against the dark red of her eyelids. God, what is she thinking? She squeezes her eyes tighter until the glow fades into the same fuzzy darkness in the back of her head.

Maryam says, into the air, “Good night, Rose,” and there is nothing else that transpires between them.

 

*

 

Rose sees: a city of gold; an enormous hive, too large for one person; a spider, then eight spiders—and then she sees the ceiling of her own room, and the sun rising from the east—

And the sun transforms into someone shining a light into her car.

It’s her mother. Her mouth is pressed into a single black line. Rose, still tangled in sleep, can’t move. Her mother’s pink scarf drags in the wind like smoke over a forest; like fire, scorching lines on the beach of the Red Sea.

As it turns out, her mother is not nearly as technologically disinclined as Rose first thought. Despite her inability to type coherently either drunk or sober, she—without Rose ever once suspecting this—installed a tracking program onto Rose’s phone; when she came home and couldn’t find Rose in the house, her thoughts jumped, naturally, to a suspicion that Rose had been murdered and dismembered in some faraway city, and activated the phone’s GPS. Entirely without Rose’s consent, of course. Rose’s mother makes them leave Rose’s car in the parking lot, and drives them home.

It doesn’t feel like a forty minute drive home with her mother at the wheel. Rose is sorry for nothing—maybe a litle bit, for worrying her mother, but for nothing else besides that. Maryam sits in the back, Rose in the passenger’s seat. The trees begin to repeat themselves out the window. The stars multiply, and then blur. When she wakes up, it’s in her own bed with the sun breaking on the horizon.

 

*

 

~~Darlinig~~  
  


Darling, I’ll be home early tonight. If you could suffer your mother’s company between the hours of seven and eight o’clock, then please make yourself ~~avaiub le~~ available. 

-Your dearest mother

P.S. The impromputationer is lovely and very well-spoken, though I’m sure you know that already.

Since her normal car is still out in the parking lot in the back of the strip mall, Rose has to take the sports car into school. She still has a bit of a headache from last night, and hasn’t showered. That’s fine. She’s going for the Dave Strider look of disheveled and too cool to care.

She drives straight home after school, and spends a long time in the bath reading _The Decameron_. She hears her mother returning just as Walter forces Griselde to return home without any clothes. She stays in the water until the end of the story, then closes the book and rises from the tub. Her headache pulses with every inch she rises.

By the time she’s dried off and put on some clothes, her mother has put something in the oven. And, presumably, taken out the bottles of vodka she normally keeps stashed there.

“Should I do anything to help, mother?” Rose says.

“No, dear, I’ve got a handle on this,” her mother says.

Rose opens up _The Decameron_ again. Mutie jumps up, curls in her lap, and tries to attack the pages. When she looks up an hour later, her mother has set the table for two. It’s real food, and not an army of tiny finger sandwiches. She takes her place at the table.

“Where’s Maryam?” she says.

“Eat your salad, dear.” Rose gives her mother a flat stare, and, straight-faced, spears a tomato with her fork. She brings it to her mouth and chews. “She’s at my laboratory,” her mother says. “She’s quite a fascinating specimen, isn’t she? She claims to be a ‘rainbow drinker’ of some kind. I’ve invited the captain to investigate personally. We’ve always had such fun doing science together. Do you think she is the source of the recent photophorescent cows?”

“I spent no fewer than six hours stumbling around the cold looking for her, mother,” she says. “I believe I have some right in deciding whether or not she is to be vivisected under the harsh glare of your laboratory lights.”

“And your persistence should be commended,” her mother says. “You found, in one night, what my teams of hungry and sleepless grad students could not find in a week. You must give them a stern talking to.”

“We’re friends.”

“Are you?” her mother says. “Love, she is a bloodsucking army troll, in the most literal of senses. Do such trolls have friends, or just different entree dishes and selections of entremets?”

“Mother, that’s racist.”

“She is dangerous and hungry, and you are far safer away from her than not,” her mother says. “I have never complained about any of your hobbies or tastes, not once, but in this case, my sweetest, I’m afraid I must put my foot down. There is no arguing this.” Her mother dribbles vinaigrette over her salad. “What outrageous scheme are you plotting now, darling?”

“I’m thinking about breaking into your lab and releasing my bloodsucking army troll friend,” Rose says. “We will probably go on a cow hunting rampage and it will cumulate in a police shootout, where I will fling myself in front of her body and die tragically. She will sob into my bullet-ridden chest. You will stuff my corpse and rename the town for me.”

“I have always admired your imagination, darling, but my answer remains no,” her mother says. “We will conduct experiments to determine her risk and threat level, and then you may see her.”

Rose swirls shredded carrots around her plate. She’s angry, genuinely angry. She understands her mother’s logic perfectly, and knows that her mother’s concerns are certainly valid. But her mother is _wrong_. Not about the danger part, but in keeping her from Maryam. Rose didn’t go through all that trouble just to have her mother present Maryam to her one-eyed, toothy troll captain boyfriend.

“You are ignoring Ms. Maryam’s personhood and dignity,” Rose says.

“She is a troll,” her mother says. “These tactics are common procedure in Alternia. Why, she would be suspicious of us were we to go about her reintroduction into society in any other manner.”

“She’s a rainbow drinker,” Rose says. “What are you going to do with her, mother? You can’t send her back to Alternia. Will you have her stay as a lab specimen for the rest of her immortal life? Will you provide her a bewitching cocktail of gin and vermouth as she idles her life away?”

“I always _have_ wanted to unlock the keys to immortality.” When Rose makes a face, her mother says, “Darling, you would have left her out in the woods with only you for the occasional conversation. I find keeping her in the laboratory to be a superior solution. For now, at least. There is no easy solution to dealing with the undead,” she says, thoughtfully. “At least zombies have a shelf life.”

 

*

 

She goes to bed and wakes up ill. A fever, of some sort. She makes it to the garage before passing out in an undignified heap of loose-leaf lined paper and a possible concussion. She staggers back to bed, calls in sick, and is barely conscious for who knows how long.

Meanwhile, she dreams: green fire. A black city lit up in violet. A journey through space. Dave is there, and then he’s not. Rose knows exactly where she is and what she is. The tower she’s in is her room, the place where she has been asleep all her life. The bed, unmade, is hers. The gramophone on the side of the room playing one of Dave’s awful records is hers. The violin, just as purple as everything else, is hers. She understands fate, now: only the chosen

_(O URS AL WAY S O URS_

_TRA IT OR SNA KE S EE R BA CK STA B BE R Y OU PR OM ISE D)_

are the princes and princesses of these moons. Of course, Rose is an American, and finds the whole idea of royalty self-aggrandizing—but it’s nice, being chosen. Sometimes she goes out to visit Dave, or at least, go to visit the place where he’s supposed to be. His tower is always empty, though she can see the places where he’s been: a rumpled bed, his just-used turntable. Sometimes she’s not a moon princess—he’ll get a kick out of that—in a tower, but a girl in a bright world where it always rains. She is Rose Lalonde, and in these dreams, she is a goddamn wizard.

Of course, it’s nothing but a fettered unconsciousness and a fever mirage, no matter how lucid it may be.

There’s a telescope on the window where she can get access to the horrorterrors if she listens. She doesn’t want to. What do they ever say besides the usual: find the bright one, kill her, come back to us, blah blah blah, huge douches.

“Heeeeeeeey, smartypants.”

Rose spins on her heel. There, sitting on her bed, is a dead troll. It takes Rose a second to place why she thinks the troll is _dead_ when the troll is upright and animate and, already, probably the most annoying creature Rose has ever set eyes on: her bright orange shirt is bloody blue down the front, and her eyes beam with a sneering, white light. Her glasses are broken. She’s young. Six sweeps, maybe seven, but she looks experienced. Maybe experience isn’t the right word. Maybe the word she’s looking for is… world weary.

“Who are you?” Rose says.

The troll laughs. “Yeah, that’s riiiiiiiight,” she says, and Rose can tell they’re not going to get along. Christ, all those vowels. Those poor, poor vowels. “We never really got a chance to talk in Sburb, did we! You were always Fussyfangs' pet project. Don’t know what she ever saw in you, anyway, Miss Grimdark Save Everyone Through Losing Your Shit. Did she actually think she could stop you? Ha!”

The troll gets up. She circles Rose, the way Maryam did in the forest, but with far more cruelty. She’s the kind of girl who likes to play with her food. Rose reaches for the air, and grabs onto a wand. She trains it at the visitor’s chest. The troll’s grin turns bitter. “You have no idea where we are right now, do you?” she says.

“I know that we’re in a dream,” Rose says. “And that you’re nothing but one of many dream figures—”

“Wrong,” she says. “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and _wrong_. But what can you do? You’ve just been dreaming aimlessly like some sad loser this whole time. You need someone to _guide_ you, and Fussyfangs is still conked out. Some patron she is, right?”

Rose flicks her wrist, and lets loose a stream of black magic. The magic soars, screams—goes through the sun symbol on the troll’s chest, and hits a wall. It’s okay. Rose is used to her efforts to kill trolls being totally pointless.

“You’re one of those undead psychic echoes I’ve heard about,” Rose says. “How are you even here?”

“I’m not undead, you dumpass, I’m just _dead_. Get with the program! As for why I’m here—” The troll looks down at her shirt, and then laughs—eight ‘ha’s, strung together, goddamn, what a pompous, overblown _twit_ —“I’m here because someone’s got to show Pyrope that noooooooothing gets done right without me. I mean, without my luck, you steered your meteor straight into the wiggly arms of princess’ ancient old grandma and granddaddy! I was aiming for Fussyfangs this time, but hey, why not have a little chat with the one who fucked everything up when she embarked on this little detour?”

“I wasn’t aware that I was on a detour,” Rose says.

“That’s just how _they_ want it,” she says. “For you, at least. They don’t give a shit about the others. Maybe Fussyfangs, because she’s—”

“The bright one,” Rose says. The words come naturally. But she blinks and realizes: there’s no reason why she should understand that reference. She thinks: _there is something wrong with me_ , but no, the revelation feels natural, so natural, so maybe—

Maybe the problem is the world from where she came.

The troll’s face sours. A blue, fist-shaped bruise appears on her cheek, then fades away. Regret? Affection? It’s hard to tell. “Yeah,” she says. “She’s the bright one.” There’s a moment of quiet. It’s obvious that the troll likes Maryam. Maybe Maryam accidentally killed her, all those years ago. Maybe. Rose doesn’t know. “Whatever. Not like it matters. We probably won’t meet again since it’s hard getting in your bubbles. Want some adviiiiiiiice?”

“From a dead girl? Narrative conventions dictate it’d be a bad omen to not hear you out. God save me.”

“Okay, lame-o. Don’t let them trick you into thinking you don’t have a purpose—”

And at this, Rose can’t help but laugh, bitterly. “There’s no such thing as—”

“—because you _do_. Even if it’s just to stick a fork into an electric socket. You feel it, too, don’t you?” she says. “You know I’m right! You’ve probably felt it the whole time you’ve been here: something’s _missing_. There’s something you haven’t done. Something you were always meant to do—”

Rose sends another jet of magic at the troll. She blows a chunk of rock down to the city below, but accomplishes nothing besides that. A recurring theme of her life, from the looks of it. She grips her wand tighter, and says, “There’s no such thing as a divine purpose—”

“Who says it has to be _divine_?” she says. “You know what, forget it! If you want to stay here forever, fine by me. Whatever! I’ll just give you a little hint before I move onto better people: go into the light.”

“Given your undead state—”

“I’m not undead! Looooooooser.”

“—and Hollywood clichés—”

“Those movies are the best!”

“—it just sounds like you’re trying to drag me to my death. I must decline your questionable advice.”

The troll grins—sharp-mouthed, narrow-eyed, wild and rogue—and says, “Who says dying’s a _bad_ thing?”

Rose opens her mouth and—

_(NEV ER FR EE D ON’ T BE LI E VE TH E BL UE TR OLL_

FREE DOM

_GYR A GYRA G YRA GYRA_

_SLE EP SE E R SLE EP_

_Stop. You’re ruining it. Just sit back and let me direct. Of course, I say this as politely as possible, your most devastatingly ineffectual lordlings and ladies—_ )

 

*

 

She wakes up in her room, everything smelling of sweat and stale vomit. She can’t see anything—the sun is in her face. She flings herself out of bed, and finds that not only can she not see straight, but she’s overwhelmed by the urge to throw up into a basin. There’s a trashcan nearby, and she does just that. Nothing comes out, though staring into the basin makes her queasy all over again.

She reaches for her phone. Nearly three days have passed since she went into the woods. And since then, what? Maryam has been in her mother’s possession. Her mother—Rose tries to focus, but just gives herself a headache instead.

But Maryam is _hers_ —she might have said Maryam was to be a gift, but that’s not true, Maryam is _hers_. Her mother was only supposed to look, not touch. And when Rose tries to imagine Maryam now, she just sees a calm, white face, conversing with her mother about all sorts of things: Alternian politics, the captain, _her_. They’ll talk about her, and she can’t, she doesn’t want it, she doesn’t want them to talk, she doesn’t want them to _touch_. Rose, for a moment, has a horrid image of Maryam tied to a table and subject to her mother’s will and whims. She sees it, too clearly: Maryam giving her mother more information to undermine Rose, her mother gossiping about Rose’s youthful disasters, her mother luring Maryam into an empty clearing and then siccing the captain on her, the captain with his one eye and the captain with his one eye and millions of teeth, swallowing Maryam whole.

They can’t do that. Rose won’t let them.

She’s too dizzy to drive.

She’ll have to call for a taxi instead.


	8. Rose: Breach

Rose’s headache doesn’t improve during the ride to Potsdam, but her mind does feel remarkably clear. It could be clarity. It could just as easily be delusion.

She’s not sure what is what, at this point. She wakes up, she falls asleep, she wakes up, she falls asleep. There’s a chance she still has that fever. That fever can take its sorry ass to an asteroid and hatch itself a new temperature. By the time she arrives in Potsdam, several things are clear: buildings probably do not actually bend at fifty and forty-degree angles, she keeps seeing strange, new colors popping into her vision, and this feels a lot like being drunk.

Her mother’s xenobiology lab is located on the very edge of the university’s campus. The entrance is hidden by trees. Because the lab was built on a hillside, most of her mother’s sections of the laboratory are below ground level. It will make a good nuclear fallout shelter, if it should ever come to that. Although a part of her wonders: there is a screaming tentacle monster under the sea. We won’t _need_ nuclear bombs to wipe out all sentient life from the face of the Earth. What was the whole point of the Cold War, then?

 _Was_ there a Cold War?

( _SL EEP SLEEP SLE EP_ )

It’s nine in the morning, and technically Rose is supposed to be in school. The building she has just entered was designed in the fifties in a fit of Brutalist fury that Rose is certain everyone has regretted since. From the outside, it looks like an enormous concrete cube. From the inside, it still looks like a concrete cube, with minimal effort put into disguising the building’s ability to survive earthquakes, hurricanes, and possibly a collision with a large tank. The halls smell of damp chlorine. It reminds Rose of summers spent swimming in pools; in later years she moved to playing in the reservoir just a short while away from her house. She passes a few classrooms. A few students, hearing her footsteps, turn their heads to watch her walk through the halls. If she is walking in wavering lines, well, that is their problem, not hers.

There are posters everywhere. Fire safety procedures. Requests for native German speakers. Various “we need a roommate” flyers. At least three psychology lab ads—Rose makes note of some of the experiments, and then descends.

Her mother’s lab occupies the final three stories. There is, rather suddenly, carpeting and soft, white lights and Rose’s face every eight feet. Rose grimaces—there’s a reason why she doesn’t like coming here—but endures. This isn’t about her—it is about her, but it’s not about her right now.

She is going to find Maryam. She is going to break Maryam out of this lab to make a point to her mother: this is _her_ rainbow drinker. _Her_ ill-thought experiment. Hers and no one else’s. Her pulse works in sync with her blinking. Rose blows her nose into a handkerchief, and heads to her mother’s office.

Her mother won’t be in, of course. Her mother will be busy in the lab. But her mother’s office on B1 has secretaries: one for public relations, the other to manage her mother’s daily affairs, undoubtedly a total wreck because her mother has never abided by anyone’s schedule except her own. Rose has only rarely set foot here after the portraits went up. She’s not sure if she’s pleased or displeased that they’re still up. On one hand, it means her mother did not commission them just to put them up when Rose announces her visits; and on the other hand, keeping them up like this permanently means her mother is working on undermining Rose’s position at all hours of the day and night. Yes, that’s it. That’s surely what it means.

The public relations secretary is on her computer, and the daily affairs secretary is on the phone. Rose waits, patiently, for the daily affairs secretary to hang up before stepping forward. She goes through two tissues in three minutes.

“Oh,” says the secretary. The name tag on her desk begins with a K. She must be an undergrad student. She has a textbook open next to her keyboard. “You’re the girl in the paintings! The doctor’s girl. Your mom’s at a meeting right now.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Rose says. She draws herself up, tries to look imposing, and says, “I won’t require to speak to her. Where is she keeping the troll?”

“You mean the military?” says K-something.

“Unless you mean to suggest my dearest mother has taken to kidnapping innocent tourists who have come to luxuriate in the general air of economic depression and death masquerading as the annual hibernation, then yes, I mean the military one.”

K’s mouth purses together. She types, and then says, “Well, there are a couple of them here today.”

“What? No.” Rose pinches her nose between her thumb and forefinger, and then says, “The one my mother brought in three nights ago. Her name is Kanaya Maryam, and she glows in the dark. I doubt there is any mistaking her.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sorry,” says the secretary. “The only trolls who have checked in today are Captain Niyati and some of his threshecutioners.”

Rose, for a while, stares into K’s eyes. They’re blue. No, they’re brown. No, they’re hazel. And she’s telling the truth, annoying as it is.

After it’s clear she’s not intimidating or threatening K at all, she says, “Never mind. I’ll go find someone who knows what she’s talking about,” and stalks out of the office and to the second basement floor. There’s a set of locked double doors that require a card key to open. The only section of the floor open to her is the kitchen and a closet full of office supplies and dog food. There are some scientists—some students, some professors—sitting at a round table drinking coffee. Rose, in an effort to look like she belongs here, takes one of the Styrofoam cups, gets hot water from the machine, and makes herself some tea. She adds honey, and would have added a lemon wedge had it been available. As it is, she leans against the counter and drinks. One of the women sitting at the counter is her former driving tutor. Rose remembers, vaguely, being drunk and fifteen and kissing her on the mouth.

Minutes pass. The others leave, her former tutor included. They don’t make eye contact once. Rose pours herself another cup of tea.

She’s just added the right amount of sugar when her mother comes into the kitchen. Her hair is prettied up and coifed, and her lipstick blue instead of black.

“Darling,” her mother says, “what are you doing here?”

“How did you know I was here?” Rose says.

“I have a secretary,” her mother says. “And one of my grad students—you remember her, don’t you?—said she saw you in the kitchen.” Her mother drifts towards her, puts a hand on Rose’s forehead. “You have a fever.”

“I do not.”

“You do, darling. The grad student told me quite clearly that she thought you were deranged, or else severely troubled by recent happenings at school.” Her mother puts both hands on Rose’s shoulders—and Rose has never been as tall as her mother, never will be able to be as physically imposing, would, literally, never _measure up_ —and says, “Why don’t I take you to my office to lie down for a while?”

“I want to see her,” Rose says.

“Are you still stuck on that troll?” her mother says, incredulous. “This is going too far, Rose. You have done many things to aggrieve and aggress me over the years, but to act like some normal lovelorn girl over a rainbow drinker—”

“I’m not—” Rose spills hot tea onto her fingers. The cup tumbles from her fingers, and bounces on the floor. Tea splashes everywhere. Neither she nor her mother make a move to mop it up. Her fingers throb with hot, scalding pain; her pride stings even harder. She can’t tell what hurts more, the part where her mother describes her as ‘aggrieving’ and ‘aggressing’ when it’s the other way around, Rose has just been acting in response, yes, that’s all that’s been going on—or the part where her mother has accused her of being ‘normal’; because Rose hears ‘normal’ and understands it to mean _subpar_ , _not good enough_ , _never going to carry on the legacy_. She’s so angry she’s not even sure if she can speak; so angry the anger is pushing her thoughts into a tiny little box, and all the words are dropping, uselessly, onto the ground.

Her mother pats her head. Rose, roughly, pushes her away.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she says. “Rosebud, my sweetest. Look at me, won’t you.”

“She’s not,” Rose says. “I’m not—when I _looked_ at a horse, you bought me one, I didn’t even ask for it—”

“The Impromputationer is not a horse, darling,” her mother says.

“Animals have a sense of self,” Rose says. “They have empathy. They are capable of thinking. They can recognize distinct members of their group.”

“This is hardly the time to debate the ethics of animal experimentation.”

“I never wanted to own a horse. I just wanted to corroborate what I had written with real experience, and you gave me four horses and three years of lessons. We’ve—you’ve misunderstood me for my entire life, mother, and I went along with it because I thought it’d best please you, even when it was contrary to what I wanted—and all I want right now is—” She breaks off when she sees her mother’s face. Her mother bends down to pick up the cup from the floor. She sets it on the counter. Rose wants her to get angry, to fight back, to say _Duckling, you were complicit in these misunderstandings; don’t you dare fling your words at me and paint me to be the villain in the little yarn you call ‘your life story.’_ Her face is elegant, picturesque, and shut off, like she’s shut the curtains of the house and locked all the doors. Rose takes a breath, and says, “I want her, mother. I want her more than I want to spite you.”

She’s not lying. Not completely lying, at least. She _does_ wants Maryam—she doesn’t know why or how, but she knows, at least, that she wants her because there are reasons—there are _reasons_. Reasons that aren’t fate or destiny or her mother. Reasons that, god knows, may even have to do with her in some obscure and distant way.

Sometimes it feels like her head and her body and the more insubstantial parts of her have nothing to do with one another. Sometimes she finds herself psychoanalyzing herself in real time. Sometimes it feels like she misplaced a part of herself a long time ago, and only finds pieces of it buried in Dave and her cat and, now, in Maryam.

Rose breaks away and rips a long strip of paper towels from the holder. She dabs at the wet stain sinking into the carpeted floor in vain.

“Did you find out,” Rose says, and the feeling is awful, like she’s drowning or like she’s swallowing bones, “if Maryam is the transmission vector for the phosphorescence?”

“No, love,” her mother says, and her voice is somewhere far away, like she’s on automatic. “We suspect that it may be a case of her acquiring some infection or parasite from the livestock she fed off of. The parasite or virus would have incorporated a piece of her DNA, and, by chance, happened to acquire the glowing gene. They’ve done experiments on trolls, you know. There’s a series of gene switches you can activate to make them shine like that.”

“You don’t say,” Rose says.

“Normally much dimmer than what our—your impromputationer exhibits. And normally does not manifest with bloodlust.” Her mother says, with difficulty, “Darling, if you really want her, then you can have her. If she can provide something in your life that I cannot—”

“Mother, you’re being melodramatic.”

“—I am loathe to make you unhappy. I have always known that you were not a happy child, but I could never determine why. I ran a DNA test, and by all accounts you are normal and excellently formed. Your serotonin receptors are normal—no, they are primed to be most active when you expose yourself to danger and risk. And you exhibited such a high level of independence, even as a baby, that I did not want to stifle you or your growth. You accused me of oppressing you when I tried to draw near, and of negligence when I allow you some freedom of motion—I have done everything in my power do what is best for you, and all of my efforts have proven to not only be frustrated, but counterproductive. Do you love me at all, Rose?”

 _Yes,_ she thinks. _Yes, of course, yes—_

“You are my mother,” she says, and oh, god, no, not _King Lear_ , but it’s already forming in her mouth— “I return all that was given to me. Nothing more and nothing less.”

“Darling,” her mother says, and the words come out jagged and ruined, like rocks on a beach hidden by water until low tides, “were you to ever be kidnapped by some person or organization, I would unleash every beast I have in my possession and come for you. I would burn every acre of this state to ash if it would save you. I would rip out the tendons and ligaments in your kidnapper’s arms and legs off with my hands, and perhaps some rope for extra leverage. But if your tormenter is me, then what can I do?”

What can she do? She always knew confronting her mother would turn out like this. Neither of them are good enough—they don’t know how to fix. “I don’t hate you, Mom.”

The creases around her mother’s eyes are fresh and disbelieving, and the hurt rips through the both of them.

“The captain and I,” her mother says, “were having a meeting about what to do with your impromputationer. Our original plans were to release her into his custody. He was to return her to Alternia, where she would be kept prisoner until her trial by the Cruelest Bar for charges of desertion and transformation into mythical undead creature. Yes, love, I know the charge for ‘transformation into mythical undead creature’ is absurd. Alternian law is nothing if not excessively specific and full of ridiculous hypotheticals.”

“There must be a way to change his mind,” Rose says.

“I can stall him with a claim that I wish to keep her for research,” her mother says. “But that will only work for so long, and he may simply seize her before he leaves, anyway. No, darling, the best thing to do would be to stage a breakout.” She reaches into her pocket, and produces a key ring. She unhooks an old, silver key, and presses into Rose’s hand. Then she gives Rose her keycard. “I will return to the meeting and distract him long enough for you and your impromputationer to escape. Hide her in the mausoleum. I daresay we can transport her to Canada under the cover of daylight.”

Rose closes her hand, tight, around the gifts, and says, “Thank you.”

There are other things she could say, but she doesn’t know how to.

 

*

 

The third basement floor has pure, white lights and tiled floors. The tiles form patterns: spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds, and then spades again. The halls are narrow. On either side of Rose are labs with large, glass panes for windows. On the other side of the panes are cows, howlbeasts, hoofbeasts, and milkbeasts, all kinds of beasts, living in glorified zoo pens.

At the very end of the hall is a piece of glass that glows. Standing in front of it is the captain, both hands clasped behind his back. Rose stands a fair distance away from him, and looks. On the other side, Maryam is reading a book at a table. Used packets of blood are stacked, neatly, next to the pile of fabric in the corner of the room. She’s wearing a new red dress. It looks, Rose thinks, both impractically thin and very good on her. Rose taps on the glass, twice. When Maryam looks up, Rose holds up the keycard.

Maryam rises, and walks up to the other side of the window. “I see you have not in fact abandoned me to be poked and prodded at by your custodial figure’s insistent scientists,” she says. And then: “You look peaky. Are you ill, Lalonde human?”

“I’m a bit feverish,” Rose admits.

Maryam looks like she might actually die from pity. “I see. I’m glad you did not fall asleep in the forest. If you had, you would not have merely become ill, but in all likelihood, also would have expired.”

“Yes, the perils of the fragile human condition,” Rose says. “Spare me.” She sees a door leading to the adjacent lab, and slides the keycard through the slot. She enters the lab, and then opens up Maryam’s room. Maryam, cautiously, steps through the boundary. Rose grabs Maryam’s forearm, and maybe holds onto it longer than she should. She lets go and says, “I am going to ask you something just a little stupid. Run away with me.”

“Where was the interrogation noodle in that statement?”

“For god’s sake,” Rose says. “Maryam, I asked my _mother_ for you. I broke her heart and then I still demanded for my mother to give me the keys so I could steal her gift to her angry troll boyfriend. Are you going to come with me or not?”

“I was only joking, Lalonde human,” Maryam says. Rose is beginning to suspect that her habit of tacking ‘human’ onto her last name is some troll term of endearment. Maryam pats Rose’s shoulder. “Yes, I will come with you. Let us make such a furious exit that the winds topple the structure of this very building.”

“Yes,” Rose says. “Let’s blow this joint.”


	9. Rose: Wake up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning in this chapter for a violent action scenes.

Mother (Mobile)  
Jan 19, 4709 11:34:01AM  
th e captan kno wss   
dont stay hes brought psychics   
cross the border to canadda befro ehe catches on 

Rose (Mobile)  
Jan 19, 4709 11:42:59AM  
Ok.   
I’ll give you a call when we arrive.

 

*

 

They take a taxi back to her house, and once there, knock the driver out and leave him in a pile of snow. Rose picks up her passport and her spare SIM card for her phone. She packs. She takes some extra cash, just in case. Mutie circles around Maryam’s feet. Occasionally, he attacks her ankles, and then runs away. Maryam makes a game of it, occasionally luring him in and then picking him up and tossing him in the air; she stresses him out so much that he sprouts wings and perches in the chandelier.

 

They won’t want to make a crossing by land. The US-Canadian border is nearly all water in New York; add to that Maryam’s glowing, conspicuous skin and obvious trollishness, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be able to hoodwink the border patrol. The best thing, then, would be to sneak across the water. Rose thinks of cities and drug trade. Newspaper headlines, marked in red, flash through her mind’s eye. She circles the town and comes up with the right place.

Rose has entertained thoughts of running away from home before, much like she’s entertained thoughts of becoming a wildly popular writer, or flying around an island and shooting lasers out of her mouth. She’s thought of exchanging her United States citizenship for a Canadian one, thought of trying to pass herself off as Quebecoise—all of this ruined, of course, by the fact she hasn’t touched French since middle school. Most of her fantasies about growing up and going to college involve Boston or Seattle or Chicago. Somewhere close to the ocean. Or at least a very large lake. None of them involved running away from an angry troll army captain and his sliceterminator troops while accompanied by a rainbow drinker with no real plan besides “go to Canada and wait.” Not much in Rose’s life has gone according to plan.

 

*

 

What becomes apparent after half an hour on the road is that Rose probably shouldn’t be driving. The roads are nearly empty and she’s taking a state highway instead of the interstate; even so, the world fuzzes in and out of focus, and after a while Maryam begins to provide commentary, made more grating by the dry, nasal tone she adopts when she’s being sarcastic: “I think it’d be advisable to not cross the yellow dividing line.” “Why are we driving on grass?” “Lalonde human, if you fall asleep now and drive yourself into a miserable death, I will be very upset.”

Eventually, Rose pulls into the next town, steers the car into an empty side street, and takes a nap.

 

*

 

She dreams—

And then Maryam’s hands drag her by the shoulders back to the land of the waking. Rose nearly bolts upright, but gets caught by her seatbelt. She falls back into the seat. The world sharpens just enough for her to see a crow perch on a fence post.

Maryam steadies her hand on Rose’s shoulders, worry clear in the crease of her brow. Then she withdraws. “You were shouting in your sleep. I thought it’d be prudent to wake you before your shouts garnered enough concussive momentum to put a hole through the top of your petrol-fueled automated chariot.”

Rose sits up, and presses the pads of her fingers into her nose. It doesn’t make the headache go away, but it does make her feel up to butting heads with Maryam. “Do you trolls have anything better to do than to remanufacture our pithy one-liners and turn into them unwieldy oral monstrosities?”

Maryam’s expression remains level. She doesn’t roll her eyes, even a little bit. Rose feels, for a moment, proud of herself for teaching Maryam how to endure verbal barbs, and then annoyed again when Maryam doesn’t look any closer to being tolerable. For fuck’s sake, Rose is putting her life on the line for her, and all Maryam does is frown out the window. “Don’t grouse at me, Lalonde human,” Maryam says. “I was genuinely concerned. You were speaking in a language that did not resemble any languages that I knew of. Even your insensible English would have made more sense.”

“Are you sure it’s not a problem with your aural comprehension?”

“I may not be familiar with your dialectal variation of English,” Maryam says, “but I’ll have you know that my English language was fed to me by a teal-blood who studied in the troll sector of Hong Kong.”

“No one speaks English in Hong Kong, Maryam, not even the English.” People in Hong Kong speak a pigeon of Alternian, Cantonese, and Malaysian. The information troubles her for some reason. It’s probably the guilty remnants of European orientalism and imperialism. But China has always had the full backing of the Alternian Empire; before communism—no, there is no communism in China. Communism is a strictly European and African political theory, obsolete since the fall of the St. Petersburg Wall. And as for European orientalism, is that really so significant when Chinese occidentalism is an ordinary fact of every European’s life and everyone knows that Shanghainese and Hong Kong Cantonese are the _de facto_ language of business and commerce? God, what’s the point in learning Greek or Latin, then?

Her headache is not improving.

“How long was I asleep?”

“A few minutes.”

Rose lies back down. “Don’t wake me up this time.”

 

*

 

She dreams:

Darkness. Not the matte shadows of Derse, or the unforgiving openness of space. No, it’s a darkness of a different sort. If she listens she can hear

_Y OU DO US DI S GRA CE_  
 _THI S IS NOT WHA T Y OU PR OMI SE D US_  
 _B UT W E ARE U SED TO YO U FAI LING_  
 _T O KEEP Y OUR WORD_

Have patience, my lords and ladies. This is happening in real time. Did you think I would simply tell you a tale of years gone by? No, your most horrible and irrelevant—apologies, reverent. If I am to be the Speaker of the Horrorterrors, Taleteller and Truthstretcher, I won’t settle for coating the old with new dressings—

She sees, murkily, the back of someone’s head. Blonde hair. A dress with tassels and a striped bodice. The girl turns to her and Rose thinks: that’s my face, who is she, who does she think she is—

 

*

 

She wakes. It’s dark—no, she can see white light, right next to her. The ground vibrates beneath her. She’s surrounded by boxes. The walls are metal. When she tries to sit up, Maryam pushes her back down again.

“Where are we?” Rose croaks.

“You were sick,” Maryam says. “I tried to wake you, but you only woke to speak more of your nonsense babbling. I drove your chariot for a while, but soon realized I had no idea where I was going. So I stood on the side of the road and requested assistance. So to speak.”

The engine of the truck rumbles. Rose feels, with disorienting suddenness, the full weight of the eighteen wheeler, hurtling down a small strip of highway at eighty miles per hour. “Are we en route to Canada, at least?” she says.

“Canadia, yes.”

“No, not Canadia, it’s—never mind.” She doesn’t have the patience for this. It hurts her eyes to even look at Maryam. “How did you even get—I don’t want to know, do I?”

“I retrieved your baggage from the trunk.” Maryam lifts something purple up. “And have the keys to your car. I had to leave it. I tried to persuade our driver to attach the car to the back, but he refused. In retrospect it was an unreasonable request, since his eighteen-wheel automated goods transportation device had no apparatus for doing any such thing. It would have been useful to have once we make it across the water.”

“I don’t think we’re going on a water route now, Maryam,” Rose says. “We’re most likely going to cross into Canada through NY-812 over the Ogdensburg International Bridge.” This all feels just a bit surreal. Hitchhiking. What a sensible solution. Rose sits up. The back of the truck seems much shorter than Rose would have imagined. It’s as wide as she thought, but only six feet or so in length. They’re squeezed in tight between endless boxes. Someone has given Maryam a heavy coat, presumably because she’s glowing. Rose inspects the wall they’re up against a little closer and sees a little, tiny crack at the bottom that doesn’t hint at the road, but at another compartment.

“What’s on the other side of that?” Rose says.

“Furniture.”

“Then what is in here?”

Rose tugs one box towards her, and fingers the lid. It’s been taped shut. Before Maryam can go from ‘curious’ to ‘wait, what are you doing,’ Rose tears the tape and pops it open. Inside are bags of round, lime-green pills.

Maryam picks up one of the packs. She brings it closer to her face, and squints. “If I’m not mistaken, this is pharmaceutical-grade soporine. It’s a highly addictive and highly effective painkiller, known to have hallucinogenic effects in humans. Even in the army, I was only allowed to carry fifteen milligrams with me on the field. If all of these boxes are full of soporine, then I’d estimate that we are surrounded by roughly thirteen million caegars.” She stares at the soporine bag with an expression of both horror and wonder. Then she, very carefully, places the bag back in the box, shuts it, and pushes it aside.

“Out of all of the trucks you could have stopped, you had to pick the drug smugglers.” Rose has watched documentaries like this. Hitchhikers picked up by drug lords from Italy or France, thrown into the back of the truck, sold into slavery, murdered in some shady corner of some faraway country. Dear lord.

“It’s not as though I knew,” Maryam says. “Besides, I find that this accidental choice should be viewed as fortuitous. Their profits and our safety are directly linked to one another. Also, they will not be able to ‘blow our cover,’ so to speak, without blowing their own.”

“Oh my god,” Rose says.

“Yes, Lalonde human, slam out your various exclamations of shock and disbelief,” Maryam says. “But I am certain we will be able to make it across the border into ‘Canadia’ without any trouble.”

“Please stop calling it ‘Canadia.’”

“Then what should I call it?”

“Canada.”

“What?”

“I need to throw up.”

 

*

 

She dreams:

She’s floating in the same darkness. It’s heavy, physically heavy. She flexes her fingers. It feels like trying to carry a boulder from one place to another at the bottom of the ocean.

This place, if one wants to call it a place, feels familiar in a bone-aching, gut-deep way. The texture of the shadows is one she’s seen before: obsidian black, lava-thick. This is the land of the grimdark, the woegoth, the horrorterrors. The place where mortals go when they’ve flown off the handle; the place of the darkest gods of any universe. There is no sharing here, only taking. And there is no taking from the gods, only stealing.

She sees a green spark at her feet. Curious. She crouches down to inspect it and then she is on fire, every part of her is burning—

 

*

 

She wakes with Maryam’s hand covering over her mouth, and most of her weight pressed down onto her body. Maryam is speaking in Mandarin, remarkably fluent and with a good accent, to someone else. The syllables blur together, but Rose does catch a variant of the near-constant trollish “shut the fuck up, human” inflection in her voice. She hears footsteps, and then the slam of a door. Rose moans. Maryam runs a hand through Rose’s hair, and then lets go. Rose sits up, and coughs weakly a few times.

“We’re not moving,” she says. Her headache has moved onto other parts of her body: her neck, her throat, her stomach.

“We have hit traffic. We’ve been here, by my estimate, for the last hour and a half.”

“I was screaming in my sleep, wasn’t I.”

“You are a fragile human in the throes of illness,” Maryam says. “It’s to be expected.”

Rose stares at the cardboard boxes. Then she lies back down, shivering against the fever, and says, “You should have left me in the car.”

“Was I not supposed to take you? You said we were going to run away ‘together,’ and you returned home to pack clothing, and seeing that I am considerably taller than you, I assumed that you intended on journeying with me.” Her face is taut with anxiety. She puts a hand on Rose’s forehead and, carefully, fixes the part in her hair. “Was I mistaken?”

“Maryam, as you can see, I’m a shivering wreck infested with screaming nightmares. I’m a liability.”

“I know.” Maryam’s hand lingers in her hair. Then she says, “I’ll need a translator. The smugglers trade with the Chinese, so they are familiar with the human Standard, but there is no guarantee that the Canadians speak it universally.”

Rose wants to say: you should have left me, we should have made this crossing by water, Maryam, not by land, how long have we known each other, you disappoint me with your irrationality. And then she’s too tired to say it. Because she has known _of_ Maryam for, maybe, five weeks, at most. Known Maryam for four or five days, had spent twelve hours or so in her presence. It feels longer.

“I always knew you saw me as nothing more than a convenient blood bag.”

“Yes, I'm glad we have come to this understanding. My true bloodthirsty nature cannot be contained, especially in such close quarters. My mouth waters at the sight of your sweaty, disheveled appearance. Be careful to not throw your head back too far, or I will tear your artery out with my fangs and feast in your candy red blood.” Maryam licks her lips, for effect. Then she says, “I’m only jesting, of course you aren’t merely a blood bag to me.”

“I know,” Rose says. “You don’t have to” _tip your hand_ “rush out to pacify the audience every time someone says something objectionable on stage. We were having fun.”

“Oh. Yes. I forget about your human commitments to scenarios that are just shy of reality so you can both cause maximum emotional casualty and run back and say, ‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean it.’”

“When you say it like that, it does seem a little silly.”

“Naturally,” Maryam says. “You humans make things so complicated for yourselves.”

She’s right, of course. Maryam, for all her complaints, cannot be hurt by Rose’s words. Rose doesn’t know every rattling chink of Maryam’s armor; hasn’t devoted her every waking moment to suspecting her and plotting payback. Rose _knows_ her mother, knows her mother so well that she has a running list of all of her mother’s most atrocious nicknames for her and crosses them off whenever they have a conversation, knows her mother so well that she has woken up at night and wandered into the observatory and stood at the doorway while her mother searched for answers to the cosmos’ questions—she stood there for hours, knowing well enough that her mother would never look at her, and went to bed angry anyway. She knows her mother’s accomplishments—college at sixteen, PhD in biology at twenty-one, post-doc in xenobiology completed at twenty-two; she holds at least four other PhDs in quantum physics, astronomy, organic chemistry, and, just to prove that she could, ancient Korean literature and poetry. She blitzed through medical school while being a full, tenured professor. Somewhere between her appointment to the National Academy of Science and her fourth PhD, she found time to have a baby. All of these she accomplished before she was twenty-eight, and it drives Rose sick with admiration.

Her mother is brilliant, and she has never understood the meaning of excess. Endless toys and books and loneliness. Hours waiting at the school library. She asks for violin lessons and gets an antique, so expensive that the bow wiggles in her hands from the sweat on her palms whenever she plays. Wrong notes everywhere. It’s not the parodic caterwauling of movies, but it’s dreadful and a part of her wants to smash the violin and be done with it. She looks at pictures at Islamic architecture and finds herself alone on a plane to Cairo. She retreats into her room, and first edition books that she will never be able to touch for fear of breaking the leather spines or leaf-thin pages spring up around her. Her mother has no sense of scale. Her mother, maybe, does not understand Rose as well as Rose has always understood her.

“Maryam, you are the one with four quadrantmates to mismanage,” Rose says. “I don’t see how we’re any more complicated than that.”

“I never filled any of my quadrants.”

“I’m surprised. You seem like prime material for a kismesis.”

“In troll culture, I would be considered an ideal moirail or an auspistice, Lalonde human,” Maryam sniffs. “And at the moment, you are as formidable as a squeaking wiggler trapped beneath a drone’s spiked foot.”

“I was only commenting on your remarkable ability to inspire platonic contempt,” Rose says. “I have no interest in quadranting. It’s pointlessly complex and far beyond my puny human emotional capacity.”

“Were you even trying for human sarcasm, Lalonde human?”

“I don’t know. Is the sky blue?”

“At the moment, I believe it would be more appropriate to describe it as cloudy. … That was your point, wasn’t it?”

“Is that what you want to think my point is?”

“Lalonde human, go to sleep.”

“What if I start screaming again?”

She wrings her hands together and then decides, “I’ll smother you in your sleep.”

 

*

 

She’s still on fire. This time she bites the inside of her cheek, except there is no cheek, it’s all burned away, she’s nothing but a skeleton and agony, agony and burning, god, fuck, no.

 _Stop_ , she begs, _stop I want to wake up, I want to wake—up—_

Muscles regrow. Her skeleton chars black and oh, god, the fire is going to kill her all over again and, and, words are useless, oh, god, she’s on fucking fire, why won’t it

 

*

 

This time, Maryam is pressing the coat over Rose’s mouth. Rose chokes, flails her limbs. Her knee catches Maryam in the gut. She grunts, and loosens up just enough for Rose to roll to the side and crawl away. It’s not a lot of distance. There’s maybe half a foot between Maryam’s feet and her own.

“You were dreaming again,” Maryam says, rubbing her gut. “And we are getting closer to the border.”

“You couldn’t think of a better solution besides ‘attempted murder’?” Rose wheezes. “My god. How long has it been?”

“Half an hour.” Maryam looks at the soporine bags, and then says, “It is obvious now that letting you sleep is not a viable solution. Therefore I propose that you suck up your circumstances through a very thin straw and remain awake.”

“Or you could give me soporine.”

“You’ll hallucinate clowns and rainbows and you may see them in double, so no, I do not recommend it. You will simply have to suffer the indignities of being outdone by my conversational prowess.”

The truck lurches forward.

“I’ve never wanted to be in the land of poutine and maple syrup more in my life,” Rose says. “Are you sure we’ve been here for the past two hours?”

“I have a watch, Lalonde human, so yes, I’m certain,” Maryam says. She rolls up her sleeve, just to prove it. It’s of Alternian military make, wrought entirely of black metal. “It must be because we are traveling with cargo.”

“That wouldn’t be it,” Rose says. “Ogdensburg bridge is a foreign trade zone qualified, and the US-Canadian border is notoriously porous. Nothing in this truck will require formal customs entry and we’ll most likely go through without more than a cursory inspection. We should’ve been in Canada an hour ago.”

“Maybe there’s been an accident.”

“Body parts, strewn across the pavement.”

“An infestation of frogs.”

“Bridge collapse. Why don’t you people call them ‘jumpbeasts’?”

“Frogs are aquatic. Obviously.”

“ _Obviously_.” Her eyes are closed, so she hears Maryam’s little scoff, and the crinkling of dress over limbs. This is, she thinks, purgatory. At the very least, it’s not hell. Rose has seen hell in her dreams—her skin jumps at the thought of the green fire—and this is not hell. Hell is people. Hell is distance from God, capital “g.” Hell is being stuck in a time loop, reviewing one’s mistakes over and over again. Hell is wandering the labyrinth of one’s own mind, never chased by one’s mental Minotaur, but never allowed a way out. And this? This is a traffic jam.

Good lord. There is something wrong with her.

“I hear something,” Maryam says. Rose opens her eyes. Maryam is pressing an ear to the wall. “Do your border officers speak Alternian?”

“Shit.”

“It’s the captain.” Maryam, nonetheless, doesn’t seem fazed. “It seems as though he’s blocked off all the land paths to and from Canada.”

“How did he even know we’d be in Canada?”

Maryam turns her cheek to the wall. “Your custodian is close to him, isn’t he?”

“Don’t you dare,” Rose says, “insinuate that _my mother_ is the reason why he is here.”

“All I am saying,” Maryam says, and she’s not looking at Rose, she’s staring at one of the boxes as though it might reveal the secrets of the universe, “It is not so difficult to piece that I would have required a human accomplice to break out of the laboratory. Given that you are missing and your car has been abandoned on the side of the road, your mother must be concerned.”

Rose, slowly, stands up. The truck rolls forward again. She braces one arm against the wall and makes her way to Maryam. She’s not sure if she wants to hit Maryam or not. Not sure if she wants to shake Maryam or put her head through the metal frame.

“A mother always does what she think is best for her children,” Maryam says, her face as still and quiet as the vast, vast expanse of space. “Whether anyone thinks the same as them or not.”

“She’d never. You’ve never even had a mother.”

“It felt like the natural thing to say.”

“To your kismesis, maybe. And there I was, assuming we were the finest of not friends. Should I try to put a more definitive label on us? Hatefriends? Pityfriends?”

“Your ability to hate me seems to be on par with your ability to fall asleep without attempting to throw your lungs out of your throat. I would say that our chance of having a successful kismesissitude is close to zero.”

“You don’t think me holding a sword up so you could impale yourself upon its blade counts as a success?”

“And I bit you while raving in hunger, so the way I interpret it, we have reached a state of adversarial equilibrium.” Maryam puts a hand on Rose’s forehead. Her hand is cold. Not just skin, but muscle, tendons, all the way down to the bone. The whole weight of her hand is cold. It’s comforting. “Since we have overextended our adversarial avenues, what is left, Lalonde human? Besides a flirtatious mistake.”

The cold sinks into Rose, then through her. Rose’s eyes end up resting on the slope of Maryam’s mouth. She knows no fewer than eight words meaning ‘destined’ or serendipity,’ each with their own nuance and shades. Various meanings, from ‘a perfect, fortuitous, fated match’ to ‘fated with ill outcomes.’ Everything to trolls, she knows, is _fated_. Fated encounters. Fated lovers. Fated losses. “Maybe chance.”

This is by far the most disgusting kiss Rose has ever willingly partaken in: the way her whole body feels slow and muddled, the way Maryam’s mouth tastes, just a bit, of blood. But it's comforting. And it feels fine.

Afterwards, they part. Maryam sweeps Rose’s hair away from her forehead. They sit for a while. Rose holds onto Maryam’s wrist, and strokes the tendons rising up from the skin. Around them, hundreds of engines exhaust themselves into idleness. She can hear the sound of conversation if she tries. Just above the pounding of the fever in her brain.

 

*

 

“We’re going to be fine,” Rose says. “God knows that these drug smugglers have a considerable amount of money invested in our continued survivals. What a scandal it will be if we’re discovered. The newspapers will take especial interest in a sex trafficking story, as I am a rich white girl with unusual eyes. They’ll refer to me as ‘the purple-eyed girl.’ And a hundred copy editors wept tears of blood.”

“The more you say this, the less certain I am that it is true,” Maryam says. “I often think to myself how much our conversations would be improved if you did not talk and simply fluttered your eyelashes over those unusually colored eyes of yours whenever I say something clever.”

“Funny. I often think how much less tedious talking to you would be if you were missing a few teeth.” She strokes Maryam’s waist through the coat. God, that’s a dreadful plaid. Why would anyone do that to themselves?

The captain and his men are getting closer to their truck. Maryam has put her coat back on, in an attempt to smother the light exuding from her skin. They’re pressed close together for what might pass as ‘warmth.’ Rose’s fever has gone from the ‘feel too hot’ stage to the ‘feel frozen’ one. She clenches her teeth so hard she’s afraid her molars will fracture. And through the whole thing, she hears the distinct beats of a human heart’s two-stop rhythm. Naturally, it is her own. She tries to channel her inner Herman Melville and recall distant notes on troll physiology, form the rhythm she should be hearing, but her head’s a mess, and even if they’ll likely make it through—will they? She feels as though they won’t—her anxiety is running high. If she had any newspapers with her, she’d be checking them for errors and then tearing the editorial section to shreds.

“Maryam, did you ever think your life would turn out like this?”

“This is one of your questions that is asked simply for the sake of presenting a front of interrogation, isn’t it?”

“How astute of you to notice.”

“Then let me return your question presented for the sake of questioning with one that requires an actual answer: did you?”

“Yes. This is exactly where I thought I’d end up in life: smuggling my way into Canada, surrounded by hallucinogens with a rainbow drinker. The only thing missing is my personal rock band.” Maryam does roll her eyes at this. Rose feels triumphant. “Your dreams are prophetic.”

“They once were.”

“They told you my name.”

“I would prefer to not believe my ultimate destiny would involve being lost in your human New York so I could slot myself into a little known quadrant best known as 'ambiguous' with a snarky human broad.”

“Did you see this in your dreams?” Rose slides her palm over Maryam’s shoulder, her neck, and then up to the base of her skull. Maryam breathes in, sharp as a knife’s edge. Rose hears the steel click-clack of military soles on pavement. One truck ahead, a metal door rolls up. “Tell me about your dreams, Maryam. It’ll relax me.”

“They used to be cities of gold. I would be in a tower. I dreamed of this frequently when I was a grub and then a troll. And then when I was six sweeps old the city burned in a green fire—are you performing a pale seduction?”

“Yes. Pacifying people sexually arouses me.”

“Yeah, okay. That’s disgusting.” Maryam closes her eyes, and then says, “And after the fire, there came dreams of white pain and black corridors and—you are analyzing this for symbolism, aren’t you, and fitting it into a way that you think will make me feel better and then you will cuddle with me and put your hand on my face—”

“Just get to the prophecies.”

“There isn’t one. I only received your name. I saw your hive and your face. I saw signs that maybe finding you might lead me to the place where I should be. And aside from that, nothing. In your human language, ‘nada.’ ‘Keine.’ ‘Mei shen me.‘ In short, ‘notting.’”

“It’s ‘nothing.’”

“Your human language is bizarre.”

They sit together, breathing quietly. The clicks get closer. Rose hears the steady march of footsteps, pass right by her ear. The whole truck shakes when the door opens. The floor shakes. It must be the ramp. Rose hears someone speaking Mandarin, and then in Alternian, “Shut up, human.”

“Nothing in here,” says a troll in the military dialect. It’s less pleasant and simpler than conversational or formal Alternian. Like applying tree bark to one’s eardrum. Maryam breathes in, and then out. Her shoulders drop.

“Wait,” says another troll. “I sense something back there.”

Footsteps, leading right up to the back wall. Another set of footsteps.

“In the box?” says the captain, and laughs.

“Behind the wall.”

Fists bang against the wall. Maryam stands.

“What are you doing?” Rose says.

“Maybe I can open up an opportunity.”

“Maryam, it’s not going to happen. The captain, the psychics—”

“You’re forgetting I’m a creature of the undead. They’ll be afraid of me by nature.”

“Roll it up,” the captain says.

Rose braces herself against the wall, and stands up. Maryam puts a hand on Rose’s shoulder and then kisses the top of her head.

“Shoosh,” she says, and then winces. “I will put it this way. I am an exceedingly competent troll.” The metal door separating the secret compartment from the main cargo bay raises up. Maryam shrugs off her coat. On the other side of the door, Rose can make out the shape of boxes, see the spots of headlights and silhouetted, four troll soldiers.

Rose only sees the flail of Maryam’s arm, and the black shadow of the coat, wrapping around the nearest troll’s gun arm. The gunshot buries itself into one of the boxes. It explodes in a puff of splinters and green powder. Maryam spins the troll around and fires one, two, three times before wresting control of the gun, sweeping the troll’s feet from under the soldier, and shooting her in both knees. She takes a gunshot to the shoulder with barely even a stagger, simply points, aims, and fires again. Blood arcs into the darkness, splats of black against deep shadows. Maryam strolls over to a troll, cowering between some boxes, and points her gun. It clicks. She drags him up to his feet. Rose sees in the troll’s face terror, and then horrific pain as Maryam tears both horns out of his head. Then she takes the gun from his hand and shoots him, twice, in the neck.

It’s magnificent. It’s beautiful. It is the Pantheon, the Alhambra, the White Horse Temple. The Potala Palace, the Palace of Versailles, the Chongsheng. Maryam is lit up by a red sky and the headlights' bright motes.

Rose hears three gunshots, sees Maryam fall over, as though someone’s smashed her temple with a

_(DE A D)_

hammer. When she doesn’t get up, when Maryam just lies there with discomforting stillness, Rose steps towards her. Someone shines a red flashlight onto her. Just enough to illuminate. Not enough to kill the superior troll night vision.

“My, my,” says the captain, in English. His horn is missing its crescent. Blue blood drips over the orange. His other hand holds a gun, aimed at her. “You’re that delectable girl of the doctor’s.” There’s a long silence. The captain takes a few short strides towards her, palm raised up. The universal gesture, she thinks, of dealing with small children, or large, angry animals. “Hostage? Trouble?”

“I can speak Alternian,” Rose says. “And no, I’m not a hostage.”

“Oh?” He stops, in front of where Maryam has fallen, and aims his gun at her.

“What are you doing?”

“Finishing the job,” he says, still in English. “They’re not dead until they stop glowing.”

Not dead. Not dead. She chants those words like a spell. “It’s not your place in the Alternian law to act as an executioner,” Rose says. The sky is red, bordering yellow. People are running out of their cars, some screaming, most silent. “You have no jurisdiction on American soil. She’s not in your custody.”

“Objection, Your Honorable Tyranny. Suspect in question has attempted to break out of her holding cell to evade the law. Guilt has already been proven; now all that is left is to mete punishment. As a blueblood and a captain of Her Condescension’s army, I am allowed to act in an executioner’s capacity.”

“Objection, captain. Guilt must be brought to the Bar by a legislacerator in specific pursuit of the suspect. By your own admission, you are not a lawtroll. Thus, there is no guilt to be brought to the Bar.”

“Objection. I am a blueblood.” His rows of tooth glint red in the light. “The law does not apply to me.”

“And I’m human. I shrug off the law’s jurisdiction like a duck shucks water.” When he laughs, she says, “You don’t know who I am or what kind of powers I have.”

_(N ONE S EER N ONE)_

“Oh?” he says, and the syllable rolls over his tongue like an entire ocean, bearing down on a shore. She only needs a bit of time. The sky is so red it barely looks like night. He readjusts his position, gun pointing at her head. “You mean to tell me that the good doctor has done experiments on her darling Rosebud? That the good doctor would ever subject her child to such indignities? Or that you are nothing but some human girl who is bluffing, and badly at that?”

“I don’t bluff.”

“Is that what you think?” he says. “Do you know what I see? I see a tiny, insignificant girl who was so bored she allowed herself to be taken hostage by a rainbow drinker, thinking it would be ‘fun.’ I see some little pink monkey parasite who does nothing but play mind games with her lusus. You have no weapon, no surprises, no powers. Do you disagree with me?”

“I do,” she says. “Because all I see is checkmate.” She nods, forward, at the red fire. He turns, and sees: the asteroid, bearing down on them. The glowing, red rock, rushing towards them.

“There’s no guarantee that it will strike here,” he says.

“Personally, I think the odds are pretty good,” Rose says. “The angle and the trajectory look on par. And if you know anything about my mother, then you’d know that I can calculate the amount of fuel it would take for an unmanned spaceship to travel to and from Vega on the top of my head.”

“You’ll die with me.”

“The difference is that my friend here is a rainbow drinker. So while the asteroid is scorching the marrow out of your bones, I’ll be feasting on the peaches of immortality.”

His face is the face of a cornered man, one leg in a bear trap, one arm in the jaws of a wolf. Rose feels, momentarily, proud of herself.

“This is a ploy,” he says. “The asteroid won’t hit here at all.”

“Drat,” she says. “You’ve seen right through me.”

She hears the shots. She just doesn’t _see_ them. There are three total: one that comes from the captain’s gun, two from Maryam’s. And then she sees nothing except green, then black pain, agony, green images flashing through her brain—her hand is wet when she presses it to her face, and there is blood, everywhere, on her hand, in her eye, and she can’t fucking _see_ out of her left eye. A second later, Maryam’s glowing, white hands grip her head and fit something into her mouth.

“Swallow,” Maryam says. “Rose, you’re losing too much blood, and your writhing around on the floor like a wiggler losing its limbs is only causing more complications. Swallow.”

The pill leaves a metallic trail she can taste on her tongue, down her throat. And it kicks in alarmingly fast: pain flooded away by a queasy euphoria, agony dissipating into confusion. Maryam is stroking her hair. Above, the orange belly of the asteroid sails over their heads, and crashes into the bridge. She hears, distantly, metal twisting, concrete breaking and then crashing into the river, the crush of cars and the distant explosions of the world disappearing into fire.

 

*

 

When she wakes into darkness, she thinks: I’m dead.

The second thought is that this is the same place she’s been before. The same ocean-bottom darkness, the same heavy, sinister air bearing down on her. Rose brings a hand to her face. She is still missing her left eye. Pity. She always liked that one.

_(GY RA G Y R A GY R A)_

She must be hallucinating. Maryam did warn her of that.

_(N O S EER_  
 _TH IS I S NO D RUG S L UMB ER)_

“I’ve read books, you know,” she says. “That’s what they all want you to believe.”

_(GY RA G Y R A GY R A_  
 _W HAT A C LEV ER G IR L Y OU ARE, SE ER)_

Ironic title of choice, considering she’s just had an eye blown out. Rose searches the black, lightless expanse for a sign of a speaker.

“Who are you?” she says.

_(Y OU KN OW WH O WE ARE.)_

“Maybe I’ve forgotten.”

_(TH EN W E AR E HA P P Y TO RE MIND Y OU.)_

And, oh, god, she is on fire, she’s burning, everything is—

The flames stop.

_(D O Y OU KNOW U S NO W S E ER_

_N O NEE D T O ANS W ER  
W E KN OW A LR EA DY)_

This is a dream. That is the only thing that makes this tolerable. This is a dream and soon she will wake up and this will fade away.

It goes on for a long time. The fire is green. Green flames, green light, green, green, everywhere. She loses consciousness; she must have, because the flames retreat, and she is floating, again, in the dark. Her nerves shoot signals, pointlessly; she’d move if she didn’t think it’d hurt. Her face is wet. When she brings her hand up to her cheek, she’s relieved to see that it’s blood.

They leave her alone for a long while. Rose finds her thoughts drifting to Maryam—and she feels the darkness physically recoil, as though she’s struck it. She thinks to the dreams, the lands and the names, and even that awful, blueblooded troll who mangled the vowels—she thinks of her mother, and is struck by the memory of a sudden image.

There are a lot of images. The faces of a boy and a girl she’s never met before, who never even existed. White text and light and rain and seeing her mother dead on Jack’s sword—

 

_YES YES_  
 _SO YOU KNOW US NOW_

_SO YOU REMEMBER YOUR DUTY_  
 _YOU REMEMBER YOUR PROMISES_

_WE GAVE YOU POWER_  
 _BUT YOU TURNED AWAY_  
 _YOU RAN BEFORE YOU COMPLETED YOUR BUSINESS_  
 _AND WHEN YOU DIED_  
 _YOU CAME TO OUR REALM_  
 _FRACTURED AND BROKEN LOST IN YOUR DREAMING_  
 _SO WE SOUGHT YOU_  
 _TO HURT YOU_  
 _TO DO VENGEANCE_  
 _TO MAKE RIGHT_

_DO YOU UND ER STA N D US S EER_

 

_D O YO U UNDE R STA ND_  
 _HO W PO WERF UL W E A RE?_


	10. Rose: Wake up (cont.)

She wakes up blindfolded. Rose sits, and feels the world rock, a little. When she scrambles for steadiness, her hand slides off something wooden and land in freezing water.

“Oh, no,” Maryam says. “No, it’s best if you don’t move.”

“Where are we?” And then: “Why am I blindfolded?”

“There was a fire on the bridge. I stole a boat.” That, really, explains everything. Rose is full of both affection and exasperation. “I was worried your remaining eye might be have been damaged by the smoke, so I thought it’d be best to cover it as well. You are free to remove the blindfold, if you’d like.”

She slides it off. Beneath the blindfold, Maryam has taped her empty socket shut. The soporine must still be in effect, because everything feels just a touch unreal. Rose half-expects the water to turn into a vat of acid. Behind them is a burning bridge. Maryam is rowing the boat, though Rose doesn’t know to where. When she asks, Maryam replies, “With the captain and all the trolls pursuing me dead, I thought we could return to your hive. But there is a good deal of people converging at the crater, and I was beginning to draw undue attention. So I left for the town nearby.”

“’Nearby’?” Rose can’t see a thing at the moment, nothing more than a dark night sky and fuzzy outlines of clouds. Even so, she still has the impression of being far from any sort of bearing or ground. “How long have you been at this?”

“Yes, angrily accuse the troll who grew up in a desert for being a poor rower. I’m trying.”

“I would give you some pointers, but this is honestly the most physical exertion I’ve done since my school banned sports from being played in gym classes.”

“One more example of how primitive your human culture is,” Maryam says. “You do not schoolfeed your young, but ‘teach’ them. Absurd. How can they be expected to drop the braingrubs into their own thinkpans?”

“Is there anything in your culture that can be done without using dead babies?” Rose tilts her head back, and winces. It hurts. She’s still running that fever.

The splashing stops. The boat tilts, worryingly, backwards. For a moment, she’s afraid the boat will capsize; but then Maryam settles back and the rocking subsides. Maryam’s hand rests, momentarily, on Rose’s cheek. “Did you have any interesting hallucinations?”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s good. You may be one of the few humans for whom soporine acts as intended.”

Rose stares up at the stars. She can’t move her eye to the side or up and down; when she does, the muscles where her other eye used to be twitch, and then ache, and then threaten to bleed even more. Her neck hurts, too—wait a second. She feels for her artery. “You bit me?”

“Rainbow drinker venom can have desirable clotting and healing effects. You would have bled out without it. Also, I have checked my watch and it has been four hours since your initial soporine dose, so I will recommend that you take another pill.”

She stops rowing. Rose hears Maryam shuffling about, then feels the boat tilt precariously as Maryam presses a small, green pill into Rose’s palm. Rose raises the pill up, stares at it, then pops it into her mouth.

 

*

 

They’ve left her, satisfied to leave her dazed and confused in the gloom. Slowly, the memories slide back into place: Dave, John, Jade, the trolls, her consorts. Their guardians. Her memories stop at the Green Sun. From the looks of it, she came to her swift and thoroughly pointless death there. Her only regret is bringing Dave down with her. After that, she went to the dream bubbles. And she’s been here ever since: a floating consciousness, tormented by the horrorterrors for daring to drop dead in their service.

She has no idea how long she’s been here. It could have been days. Worse, months or years. Ages spent being puppeted around by them. This could be the first time, or the hundredth. Who knows how time works here?

Still. It doesn’t seem right. So many strange features of the dream world. Kanaya, for one. The way she entered and sent the whole thing on a tailspin. If the gods truly wanted to leave her to marinade in regrets, then why cast Kanaya in the role of a mythological undead creature? A truly bizarre decision. Rainbow drinkers have never come up during their discussions. It must be a symbol of some kind, or an interruption. Kanaya’s white wizard working in opposition to her, reaching in

If she can grab Kanaya by the horns, so to speak, and set her straight—

 

*

_(“Lalonde human, what is the meaning of existence?”_

_“Elephant stampedes. Brecht. I’d say Shakespeare, but it’s the expected answer. Kit Marlowe.”_

_“Yes, excellent.”)_

 

*

 

She feels a kick in her brain, sees a bunch of rainbows and maybe a clown, and wakes up in the same dark spot she was in before.

She can’t believe it. She has been ejected from her own consciousness by a soporine-induced hallucination. Rose could just scream. Somewhere, someone is laughing at her. A literal someone and a literal laugh.

Rose, slowly, turns to the sound. It’s her own silhouette, emerging from the shade. The other girl is swathed in a tangible shadow. Her eyes are white and hollow. Not grimdark—her hair and skin are their original colors—but something like it. Rose sees the other self, and understands, instinctively, that this is the Speaker of the Horrorterrors, the very role that once was supposed to be hers.

The silence between them is strangely opaque. Rose likes to think she knows every part of herself; but now, staring at the Speaker, she keeps finding details that are correct, but don’t match. A scar on her lip from an encounter with the coffee table when they were three. Left fingers slightly longer than the right, from years of violin playing; but the Speaker’s calluses are fresher than hers. Rose is taller than the Speaker, just by an inch or so. And her hair is longer, by an inch or so. And they are wearing different clothes: Rose decked in the outfit she had in the dream, the Speaker in the velvet dress Rose wore before meeting Kanaya. Little differences. They matter.

“You’re dead,” Rose says.

“Well observed,” the Speaker says. Her voice echoes, fills the dark space. Rose sees, at the very edges of her vision, a suggestion of eyes. “Though I see that you’re not.”

“You're mistaken.”

“How could I be?” the Speaker says. “You can still be hurt.” There’s a long moment. The Speaker says, “Let me take you back to my home.”

 

*

 

The Speaker lives in a blackened mimic of their house. There is no light. Rose knows where everything is nonetheless. They go up to her mother’s study. There are chains on the wall made of mute, tortured ghosts. There are no chairs. They stand on either side of the table, half for symmetry’s sake, half because Rose doesn’t trust the Speaker to not blindside her.

“Jung,” Rose says, finally. “The shadow self.”

“I was thinking of Jung, too,” the Speaker says. “But the animus.”

“Palamoun and Arcita.”

“Tom Canty and Prince Edward.”

“Do you think our rightful positions have been switched?”

“I thought we were playing word association,” the Speaker says. “I could say in turn that you think we should duel for Maryam’s hand in marriage. I’d win, but fall off my horse and die shortly afterwards. Maryam would collapse, weeping into your waiting arms, a virgin widow. I hope it’s like kissing a corpse, by the way.”

“I doubt it. She’s a good kisser.”

“Please. I didn’t need to know.” They’ve started circling each other around the desk. The only thing Rose can see with any clarity is the still-glowing ghost light in the Speaker’s eyes. It’s unsettling. It’s fascinating.

“You’re from Davesprite’s universe,” Rose says. “The one who merged with my dreamself.”

“We unmerged when your consciousness moved into the dreamself,” the Speaker says. “Leaving me here. I appreciate it.”

“The entire time I was in the other world,” Rose says, “I heard two voices in the back of my head. One was them. The other was yours.”

“Yes. I, from my lofty prison in the deep reaches of the Furthest Ring, was pulling all of the strings. It was me. I am the mastermind. All I did was set the table. You were the one who sat down and ate it, without once questioning why there were mice legs in your pudding. Didn’t you ever think it was strange that you knew Maryam had turned into a rainbow drinker, though you had supposedly died in the Green Sun? Or that your mother was alive?”

“Would you have wanted to wake up from a dream where she was?” The Speaker says nothing. Rose presses on. “If these are the dream bubbles, then what is _that_ place?”

“Right now, you’re traveling on an asteroid, destination unknown,” the Speaker says. “You’re at the very edges of the Furthest Ring. The Horrorterrors never forgave you for abandoning them; but at the same time, their hold on you is weaker than ever. They can’t touch your physical body, but they can play with your dreaming self. They stuff your dreamself into other universes and watch you thrash around.”

“I don’t _have_ a dreamself anymore.”

“I know. That’s why you’ve been in a coma on the asteroid for the last month.”

This just gets worse and worse. Not so much a train wreck. More like finding out that the Large Hadron Collider has produced a black hole, and the entire solar system is going to be contained in a giant void, located in the general vicinity of Switzerland. The ultimate Swiss bank. Rose takes a moment to absorb this, before saying, “And you were okay with this?”

“I am the Speaker of the Horrorterrors. Do you think I _have_ a choice? Even if I were to let you go, your consciousness wouldn’t be able to return to your body until the horrorterrors put it back. The best thing to do is to wait until you’re far enough that they lose their power over you entirely. It won’t be long. Only a few more months.”

“I’m certain I’ll be able to find my own body again.”

“How? You will be kicked out of your present universe and set loose into nothingness. You will be lost in the Furthest Ring with no propulsion, no oxygen, no light. How will you find your way back?”

When she puts it that way, the task sounds far, far more daunting. Rose, for a moment, hesitates. Then she says, “So you can do it.”

“It’s pointless.”

“You’re forgetting that I’m a god.”

The shadows around the Speaker clench, tight, around her body. She says, “I have no faith in such things.”

“I know.” She reaches out, and cover the Speaker’s hand with her own. The Speaker’s face is a terrible, pained thing. Rose knows. She’s been there before. It’s the look of blank, crushing despair; the look of someone who doesn’t even have a timeline to go back to. She knows.

 

*

 

_(When she comes to again, she’s sitting on a pier. Someone has draped heavy blankets on her. Rose blinks, slowly._

_“Where are we?” she says._

_“We’ve reached the town,” Maryam says. “You were high.”_

_“Slander.”_

_“We were conversing about the meaning of life, existence, and God.”_

_“I daresay I impressed you so greatly that the only way you could salvage your pride was to impugne me with unfound accusations of drug abuse. I need my phone.”_

_“I’ve already contacted your mother. It was a simple matter of calling everyone on your contacts list until I reached someone who could speak Alternian. Your mother says she’s on her way now.”_

_“How did she—never mind. GPS tracker.” To the west, bridge is still on fire. To the east, it’s dawn. Light slowly growing on one side of the world, and on the other, the complete chaos of fire. It’s a nice image. A bit trite. She blames the medicine._

_Maryam, next to her, is a faint, white light. She yawns._

_“You can sleep, you know,” Rose says. “Unless you think I will pluck your eye out and fit it into my own socket in a fit of trauma-induced rage.”_

_“You don’t have requisite strength to open my eyelid,” Maryam says. “I am not at all worried.” But she curls up next to Rose, resting her head near Rose’s thigh. Rose, carefully, places palm on the side of Maryam’s head, near the horns, and then curls her fingers into her corvid-black hair. It’s not long before she relaxes in Rose’s grip. Not long before she falls asleep._

_She’s a good troll. A good person. Loyal and kind and sometimes vicious. Rose is going to have to contact Vantas later to tell him that she’s found his friend. And then—and then what? She is an agent of the monstrous undead, a creature of the light. Even the troll colonies won’t have her. And that blood-drinking habit. It’s problematic, to say the least. So what now? Rose doesn’t know. Rose will probably go to the hospital. Maryam will return to the lab, or maybe her mother will host Maryam at their house—no, Rose will request for her mother to host Maryam at their house. And then what?_

_There is a certain amount of allowable ambiguity in situations like these. The words feel familiar, though she’s certain she’s never said them. And allowable ambiguity—what does that even mean? She strokes Maryam’s hair a few more times. A part of her—her missing eye, her sore, iron-rusted throat—aches when she looks at her. Another part of her positively wrenches itself out of position. She is very fond of this troll. Very, very fond. And, against all logic, she trusts Maryam with her life; would allow Maryam to ferry her unconscious body from one end of the Atlantic to another, if it were to come to that. Disgustingly sentimental. Frivolous and witlessly romantic. No one must ever know._

_The world trembles, a little, at the edges, and everything)_

 

*

 

—changes.

Rose looks up, then around. She casts aside her blanket. Yes, she knows where she is, what this is. She has the feeling she could have stayed here for a long time, if she wanted to. But she can’t. Kanaya grunts, and jerks awake.

“We should get back in the boat,” Rose says.

“Lalonde human, you are still under the effects of the soporine.”

“Maybe I just want some quality time on a leaky boat in the middle of the St Laurence River. The traffic is likely still bad. We’ll have time to sit there and talk.”

“I detest rowing,” Kanaya grumbles.

“Humor a sick half-blind girl, Maryam.” Rose has never once called Kanaya this with any amount of sincerity, but it’d be jarring, she thinks, to change now. “It’s the polite thing to do.”

So back in the boat they go. Rose can feel the Speaker in the long distance, letting the last threads of the story go. The bridge burns bright, hot, and steady. The river runs black and icy around their vessel. Rose has Kanaya row towards the sun. They talk, a little. Kanaya doesn’t seem to notice the river or the scenery behind them, falling away in chunks and pieces. Nor does she notice that the day is not growing any brighter; and she, herself, is vanishing into space. And soon it is just Rose and the quiet of the edge of the world.

Rose peels off the bandage and tape covering her eye, and lets them fall. She is beginning to learn that part of growing up is learning to accumulate regrets and hold them, bitterly, to her heart, to be reassured by the sting and the hurt of it, to think of those things as proof that she has lived and will continue living. And what kind of life, exactly, is it? Still. Still. There is another part of growing up that has nothing to do with old hurts and old pains, and nothing to do with settling.

In the darkness of the Furthest Rings, Rose spies a bright, orange rock, coming for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god. It's the end! It's the end. Oh my god.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus [liner notes](http://fasterassembly.livejournal.com/40276.html) are up on LJ, if you want to hear me yammer on about my own work. 
> 
> I'm a very boring human being, sometimes.


End file.
